 the mainline cork here in browning needs to be sanded. So I've got the sanding block. It's a long sanding block because a long block will make the sanding go smoother. No lumps and hollows, at least hopefully. This is 60 grit sanding paper here. To make the seams more visible, I used a sharpie pen before I put the cork on to highlight the corners. It makes a great guide for laying your track lid on. It's a good idea to make sure you've got the right size rail before you go installing it. I like to solder two three-foot pieces of microengineering flex track together to make a six-foot piece. I snip off the last tie to make room for the rail joiners. Then I use a small file to remove any burrs that might be present. The burrs have to come off for the rail joiners to slide on. I always use microengineering rail joiners with microengineering rail. Microengineering rail's got a smaller cross-section than other products. After sliding on the rail joiners, I pull out the soldering iron and solder the two pieces together. Microengineering flex track can be a little difficult to line up in a curve. It doesn't want to bend easily, but this tool makes life a lot easier. I'll show you how it works. Well, we start off by holding the track sort of in position. Then I put this on. It slips on the rails, and I'm putting a gradual curving pressure on it. I don't want to work all at once. Kind of coaxing it into position. See how easily this is going? It's a little bit of time. Easy does it. One of the things that happens, though, is that the ties tend to slide around, and they're not perfectly aligned anymore. So I'll need to take care of that. I need to tweak those back into shape in a little while. It's very difficult to get into precise shape at this point. So what we're trying to do is rough shape it. Now we're getting close now. Look at that. It's almost flowing around this curve. Before I had this little tool here, the shaping business was a lot more painstaking. We're at a lot more tension. Well, we're going to have to trim the track down here where it hits this turnout. So let's get it ready. Well, you can see here that the ends of the flex track and the turnout don't line up particularly well. The first thing we'll have to do is take some ties off. We're going to line the track up here. I'm going to site down it. Where should we cut it? Well, let's cut it right at the end of this piece of turnout rail here. Now, when I cut it, I'm going to take a little more off than I really want to. So I'm going to mark it. So I pulled it this way. I'm going to mark it by just denting it with the edge of the rail nippers. And we can get in here. After we snip the track, you can see the burr that's left here. We're going to have to file that off. We've got to do some deburring, and let's take some burrs off the end of this one too. Well, let's see if we can get this to fit here. Hopefully it'll just slip on real nice. Yeah, that's good. So I'm going to mark here. I'm using this green pencil. Use a red pencil, but I can't seem to find it. So green. This is how far I'm going to be spreading the glue. I don't want to get glue in here. So do that. And there's a couple more places I need to mark. I'm going to put feeder wires underneath these rail joiners. I'll bring them up and we're going to solder them right to the bottoms of the rail joiners. That way they won't be visible. But I need to know where the holes are going. Mark where the rail joiners are on both sides. You're going to sort of see those marks here. But that'll be good enough. Finally, we're going to mark here at the end of the flex track. And this is how far we need to spread the caulk. Make the feeder wires long enough to reach the bus underneath, but not too long. I use red and black wire. I'm going to strip about half an inch off the ends of the wires. I'm going to leave the wires poking up a little bit here. I'll make it easy to remember where they go. And also I'm not so likely to get glue on the business ends. When I go to spread caulk, I use this tool. The notches on it leave little ridges of caulk behind. Sort of like the notch trowels at a tile layer or a linoleum layer uses. This is what I use to put down the caulk. It's just a tube of latex paintable caulking. I'm just running a bead of caulk down the center of the cork. Don't forget to plug up the end of the tube of caulk again and it'll be solid when you come back for it. Now we're going to spread the caulk out. I've got my little tool here. It's a little tricky around the wires. Don't want to get any caulk in there. Judging from the build up here, I'd say I put too much down. So where I got too much caulk on spread over the edges, I'm going to try to take that off with this knife here. If you do get too much it'll start squirting up between the ties. It'll just make a mess. We're going to bend the tops of the feeders. They're going to come up underneath the rail and we're going to solder them to the bottom of the rail joiners. Let's pull them down right now so they're in position. Okay let's put that rail in place. We've got the flex track here. Going to sit it on and slip it into the joiners down here at the turnout. The feeder wires are here underneath that joint and there it is. I was looking for my track alignment tool again. I'm going to use that to push the track into position a little here and also to bed it down in the caulking compound. You can see here that when we moved the track we wound up with a bunch of ties. I got jammed up next to each other. We don't want that so I'm just going to take these tweezers here. I've got the wrong end of them and I'm just running them down the ties here and that just gently moves those ties around just about there. I think we've got the tie spacing restored here. One of the things that I found is that if you want the track to be straight you've got to use a straight edge to do it. If you don't use the straight edge it's not going to be straight. I'll sight along it here and that's looking pretty good. For the curves I'm going to use my track alignment tool some more and it's difficult to tell just by looking at it whether it's really curved or not but I can feel it. I put this on and I apply slight twisting pressure to it and I can feel where the curve isn't continuous. So it's a combination of looking and feeling. I hope I could feel there's a lump there. Get that up. Try to be careful to keep my fingers out of the caulking compound too. Either twist this way or twist this way to try to get the track to be a little more curved or a little less curved. Let's double check the straight piece down here. Is it still straight? And the answer is no. It moved a little bit. I don't want that. Let's move it back again. I think this is about done. So we got one more thing to do. Kind of wait it in place. Actually there's a little more than one thing to do because we still got to solder those feeders in place. That's what I call the canned goods express. So we'll let this set for a long time several hours at least and overnight is better and then we'll come back and we'll pull the cans off and put the feeder wires on. Well I pulled the canned goods off the track and I'm going to solder the feeders on. First step of course is to tin the feeder wires. I'm going to solder very well unless they're tinned. I'll try to leave a little extra solder on them. I'm going to push up underneath the track pushing up on the wire. Made a little kink in the solder end that'll help get the solder up underneath the reel joiner. I like doing it this because it hides the joint and we pull down on the wire. Okay that's nice and strong. Get some solder underneath there too. Pull down. That's good and strong. Okay those feeder wires are soldered now. Well that concludes my little tutorial on how I lay my Grench nearing flex track. I hope you found it useful. Bye now.