Reinforced actuator wires

Due to a number of reasons, a wedding anniversary trip to Rome and a cold among others, have made layout time scarce lately. But the last few days I have managed to make some useful progress - all the Tortoise switch machines are now hooked up and possible to control with toggle switches on the fascia.

Most of them worked fine on the first try, but a few of them did not. They did not move the points all the way up to the stock rails, with a derail as an inevitable consequence. The first attempt to remedy this was of course to slide the green plastic piece on the Tortoise, the one with a hole which the actuator wire runs through, further down. This to create more actuator wire swing. But that did not help.

Since there is quite a vertical distance between the top of the Tortoise and the turnout, 2" of foam and 1/3" of MDF, the stiffness of the actuator wire could be the problem. The original wire is quite flimsy, so I had switched to another type of wire from the start. I used wires about 1 millimeter (around .035") thick. So I ruled out the wire as the cause of the problem. Especially since 7 out of 9 turnouts behaved as they should.

The only reasonable reason for two of the turnouts to have problems is then that the points of those turnouts are harder to move all the way up to the stock rails, as compared to the others. And the only reason for that is the electrical wiring of the point rails. My guess is that the wires I use for this simply create to much mechanical resistance.

Since I could not, at this point, make anything to lessen that resistance, without losing power to the points, my only option was to overcome the resistance (brute force). And since I refused to believe that the problem was lack of force in the Tortoise itself, it all came back to the actuator wire. It needed to be stiffer still, for these two turnouts.

The only thicker piano wire I had at hand was more of a thin steel rod than a wire, so I did not want to use that. Some flexing of the actuator would still be healthy, both for the turnout and the Tortoise. So I ended up soldering a piece of stiff rod along part of the actuator wire, making the wire stiffer but still flexible. The photo below shows a wire with a rod attached to make it stiffer.

The wire reinforcement turned out to be the trick. Both troublesome turnouts now move the points all the way up to the corresponding stock rail!

I since detected yet another turnout that sometimes shows the same effect, but now I know how to fix it.