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--- Designing and Making A Curved Turnout With About ---

.. --- Any Main and Diverging Route Radius – Pt. I ---

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NOTE: Later I came up with what I think is an easier way to design a template for a custom curved turnout. You can find that information ( HERE ).

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I had made some curved turnouts using FastTracks turnout templates but they don't have every radius combination for the main and diverging routes. I wanted one or more with a 14 inch outer radius and a 12 inch inner radius. I had been using the free SketchUp Make CAD program for other projects and for designing my hopefully soon to be built N scale layout and decided to try using it to design turnout templates. (Note: SketchUp Make has been replaced by SketchUp Free but at the time I'm writing this, fall 2019, it looks like you can still download Make)

I read some online articles on designing a turnout and found that I could draw a full size turnout using SketchUp but ran into a problem trying to print it full size. There just doesn't seem to be an easy way to do that and I needed it full size to use as a template for building the turnout on.

I came up with a fairly easy solution to that. After laying out the turnout I put a 10 3/4” X 6” box around it drawn to full size. At this point I zoomed in so that just the box was mainly showing on the screen and then hit the 'Print Screen' key on the keyboard to capture the image.

Nest I loaded the free paint.net program which I like a lot ( https://www.getpaint.net/ ). I opened a new file and pasted the SketchUp drawing into it using 'Ctrl' and 'V' at the same time.

Follow the picture above and below to see how to print the template out full size....

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This concludes how to print the template out full size. You might notice that I made the track width .375 when in reality it is suppose to be .354. So it is .021 thousands wider. Using SketchUp it was easier to do this. Not that much wider and when building the turnout using the paper template you need to check the track width often when soldering the rail to the printed circuit board (PCP) ties anyway. I use a NMRA gauge along with a couple different trucks that I've gauged to a proper width.

I'd recommend looking at layout design on the internet first. I did and how I designed the template with SketchUp was similar but somewhat simplified from what I found. The turnout seems to work fine though. The main and divergent routes are the radiuses that I wanted but between the points and the frog on the divergent route the radius is less but seems to work fine.

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