Regular readers will recall the disaster I incurred in my attempt to use a belt sander for tapering roadbed and truing joints between Homasote sheets (Banning the Belt).  In laying the sub-roadbed for Monterey, which is essentially a Homasote tabletop, I was faced with three wide joints with a significant mismatch in height.  As I’ve mentioned several times, Homasote isn’t known for its consistency in thickness.  These height mismatches between panels were as great as a 16th of an inch…much too great to simply lay track, or even roadbed and track over.

Hand sanding large expanses of Homasote isn’t practical.  It just doesn’t sand like wood.  This past weekend I knew I had to get these joints matched up before track laying could commence.  So I tried another approach to the problem.  I had a Surform tool in my toolbox so I tried it out.  Surprise, it actually started shaving off the Homasote.  Now, it wasn’t pretty.  It actually grabs little chunks of Homasote and rips them out.  The tool clogged quickly, but a small stiff bristle brush worked well to clean it up.  I didn’t want to simply do a quick taper right at the joint, but rather I wanted a gradual taper of at least 3-4 inches in width.

Once I got it fairly close with the Surform tool, I decided to try my finish sander for the final sanding.  I attached some 50 grit paper (pretty coarse for a finish sander) and started working the surface.  This worked out much of the roughness created by the Surform tool.  I worked it for quite some time and ended up with a pretty decent taper and surface.

The final step was to smear a coat of drywall mud over the joint, building up from the formerly thinner side of Homasote up to the joint.  I’ll sand this down tonight and apply another coat.  After doing this two or three times, I should have a pretty decent joint between the panels and will be satisfied.

It was several hours of work, but in the end I think it’ll be worth it.  Did I mention the layer of fluffy dust over that area of the room to clean up?

On another note, I had intended to keep my electrical wiring current with the track laying.  But I’d let the wiring slip over these past couple months.  Surveying under the layout, I realized that there were about two dozen sets of track feeders that hadn’t been connected to the power bus yet.  I took the first step in installing the terminal blocks at each location (which serve as the interface/disconnect between the feeds and the bus), and I crimped spade lugs on all of the feeders.  Over the next weekend or two I’ll make taps into the power bus and run the heavy gauge taps to the terminal blocks.  My method, though tedious, works quite well and should result in dependable wiring that will also be easy to troubleshoot when necessary.

All in all, a pretty busy weekend especially since I was away from home most of Saturday.

-Jack