Today I finally got around to installing my new Aristo/Polk’s, wide radius, stainless steel switch. It differs from the ones I already have in service.
The stock rails are ground away, and the points are ground in a way that the point rail nests against the stock rail, under the stock rail rail-head.
Hopefully this design will help prevent wheels from picking the points. In my case it won’t matter much, because the switch is in a reverse loop where all mainline traffic will be traveling across the switch trailing point. But when I do switching operations, it may help.
The frog is even with the tops of the rail-heads, so I do not need to sand the frog down, like I had to on the original Aristocarft switches.
I did not measure the frog flange-way depth, but my LGB engine that I ran through it didn’t bounce nor jump, so its probably deep enough. Time will tell.
The manual switch machine is unchanged from the original design.
I found that installing the Bachmann switch-stand was pretty easy. I did have to adjust the position of the cam gear inside the unit, so that the point rails would seat properly against both stock rails. That was easy to do. But the throw rod kept popping out of the slot in the Aristo throw-bar. So I took some plated steel rod and fabricated a retainer for the throw-rod.
Now the switch throws properly and the throw rod no longer pops out of the throw-bar slot.
What? Yea, you guessed it. The plated steel rod is a paperclip. I have 2 boxes of paperclips, 2 different sizes, on my workbench. They are cheap, and they have so darn many uses. Well, they do in the hands of someone like me.
