Home made uncoupling tool

This is another post in what seems unintentionally to be a series of "home made" posts.  As I work with the layout these things just come to me.  In this one I will show how I made an uncoupling tool from scraps of styrene.

Over the years I have purchased a few packages of the RIX uncoupling tool.  They come two to the package and do the job.  The tips are a bit fragile and I have broken several off.  I was down to my last one and about to buy another package when it occurred to me that I might be able to make something similar and perhaps sturdier. 

Shown below is one of the ones I built next to my last RIX tool.

Here is a list of the materials used:

• Evergreen 214  (.125" OD rod) 
• Evergreen 226  (.131" ID / .197 OD tube)

One end of the rod was shaped into a flat point with sandpaper.  A short section of tube was glued to the rod to act as a stopper when the tool was placed in a holder and a larger section was glued to the other end of the rod to be a handle.  I also make holders for the uncoupling tools from the same size tube.  These are simply glued into position with E6000 adhesive.

 

Home made car card holders

As the Carlin section with it's small division point yard is now part of the layout, I have become more interested on operations.  In a previous post I explained how I made up car cards and waybills for the industries at Battle Mountain.  At that time I was just clipping them to the lighting valance above the location of a particular industry.

 

With the Carlin Yard being operational I was ready to take the next step and arrange the cards into holders along the fascia near each industry. Also I wanted to have card holders that represent the arrival / departure track in Carlin.

There are some nice car card holders available on line but I decided to make my own with plastic materials I already had on hand.  I had this old control panel that I had made almost 30 years ago for a friend's large layout.  When he moved into a retirement home and tore the layout down about 20 years ago he gave the panel back to me and I have been salvaging things from it ever since.  The panel is made from a 1/4 inch plastic material that is really nice to work with.  With all the holes from switches and LED's there's not much in the way any large areas left.  But cutting it into strips gave me the material I needed to make the side and bottom walls of the car card holders.

The front and back of each holder is made from .030 Evergreen styrene.  The strips are glued onto them using ZAP super glue on edge which is 1/4 inch.  By cutting the strips in several different widths, the depths of the car card holder could be sized for the expected amount of cards it will be required to hold.  For example, a track that can only hold 2 cars gets a 1/4 inch deep holder.

After evening up the edges and rounding the bottom corner with a belt sander, the holders were painted with Krylon smoke gray spray paint to match the color of the fascia before being glued in place using E6000 adhesive.