A major feature of these modules is a rail ferry, the connection to the outside world (also functions as staging and/or fiddle yard). Since the layout is assumed to be based roughly on the Esquimalt & Nanaimo (but with the studied-but-never-pursued option of a bridge from northern Vancouver Island to the mainland and link up to the transcontinental mainlines) these modules will represent Nanaimo as the mid-point on the Vancouver Island line.
The real present-day rail ferry in Nanaimo can be seen on Google Maps (49.165,-123.929). It actually looks fairly similar to what I have on the layout, although that wasn't intentional (I hadn't decided this should be Nanaimo at the time of track planning).
I used the recently re-released Walthers Rail Barge (933-3152) and matching Car Float Apron (933-3068), and also the Railroad Tugboat (933-3153). The barge is large kit but easily assembled. And really needs a coat of paint, looks very plastic! \
(yes, that's a VHS tape, it's the perfect thickness to support the bridge during test fitting)
For the harbour section I cut out the Styrofoam at about a 45-degree angle before I glued it down. The rest of the foam I had glued the plywood with contact cement. Test-fitting the barge and apron on the layout:
Now to prepare the water area. I painted over with some primer and almost-black paint that were lying around, and that already made it look much better than bare plywood. A few more coats of paint in various shades of blue and green made it look a little more watery, but the overall effect is still of very dark water.
I wanted a rip-rap shoreline, and I had a bag of gravel that looked just about right.
It's a fairly laborious process since you have to place each stone individually for it to look right, but once done the effect is quite nice.
The holes you see above are for the wood pilings, which I made from 1/8" dowel, roughed up with a hacksaw blade to give some grain. Seven of them bundle together just perfectly to fit in a 3/8" hole. I used either my smallest spring clamps or rubber bands to hold them together while the glue dried.
With all the pilings and stone in place it's starting to look like a harbour
To make the water I simply dabbed ModPodge gloss medium over the whole area using a foam brush with a wedge tip. After spreading the ModPodge over the whole area I pushed the foam brush firmly into the wet medium and lifted off vertically, leaving a raised line from the centre of the brush where it last made contact with the surface. Just dab and repeat in lines parallel to the shoreline and you get the effect of waves and generally ripply surface. Very easy to do and looks good when dry.
I didn't put much coverage under where the barge would go because nobody will see it.
I ended up putting down probably 7 or 8 layers of ModPodge to build up the gloss and texture. I'm happy with how it turned out.
Now it's time to transfer the track plan to the layout.
I drew a grid on the Styrofoam, 12" grid in red and 3" grid in black.
I printed out the track plan from XtrkCAD full-size on regular letter-size paper, with the option of location markers selected. I laid the track plan pages onto the layout and stuck a straight pin in each location crosshair and made sure it lined up on the corresponding grid line on the styrofoam. It worked quite well.
Then came the painstaking process of poking the straight pin through the track centreline every centimeter or so to create a line of pinprick dots in the foam. After removing the paper track plan I put a dot with a blue Sharpie in every pinprick, and then connected all the dots to end up with all my track center lines readily visible.
Once the track planning was done, it's time for benchwork. At the time I was a strong believer in heavy-duty construction, so everything is 3/4" plywood. As time went by and I had to move these around a little, I see weight can be a consideration. Check out the 2016 posts for updates on that front.
I got my local hardware store to cut the plywood to 70.5"x32" (add on a 3/4" end plate to each end and you have the 72" module length). From the leftovers I ripped the 4.25" longitudinals and 24"x6" end plates.
Everything is screw-assembled with angle brackets. Which is great if you need to disassemble it to move things, and did come in handy once, but it's a lot more work (and weight) than glue.
Add on a layer of 1" styrofoam on top and the basic table is complete
I have been traveling a lot in the last 5 years so not a whole lot of opportunity for model railroad progress. However, I have also been lax in my updates here, there has been a little more progress than 3 years of not-posting would indicate.
I have been taking photos along the way, and I will attempt to catch up current progress in with a number of photos and a few comments along the way.
I had been fully expecting to use DCC when I started the first E&MH, and indeed I bought a NCE PowerCab DCC system, although I never got the chance to install or use it before the layout came down. Since I'm generally planning on following Free-mo specs for v2 of the E&MH, I was planning on getting a Digitrax Super Empire Builder set (Free-mo specifies Digitrax as the control system standard).
However, in the mid-August update email from Model Railroad Hobbyist, I noticed an ad from Ring Engineering. It was actually the non-descriptive name that caught my eye, strangely -- I didn't know who they were or what they did so I went to their website. Their big product is RailPro. Not that they're new advertisers, or a brand new company, I just never happened to notice their ads before, or rather that RailPro was something other than just another brand of DCC. It's not.
They have two introductory videos on their site, so I obligingly started up the first one, not expecting much more than the usual marketing about how ours is better than theirs, but as the video went on I became quite fascinated. In short, RailPro is a direct-control radio system -- the locomotives get only DC power from the track, and all the control commands are sent via radio commands (2.4GHz, similar frequency and range as Bluetooth) directly from the controller to the locomotive. Moreover, the communication is two-way. Not only can the locomotive (or power supply, or switch machine, etc) talk back to the controller, but the components could actually talk to each other, as in their impressive demonstration in part 2 of the video on linking two dissimilar locomotives. (Note: I'm not 100% certain from the video if the locomotives actually do talk to each other directly, of if the data is centrally handled by the controller, but I still believe that peer-to-peer communication could be possible even if it's not currently handed that way).
I did get a chance to read through the manual of my NCE PowerCab, and the number of buttons on it, or any DCC controller, is moderately intimidating, especially since they have somewhat cryptic mapping between buttons and functions. I'm a computer programmer and am perfectly comfortable thinking in binary or hexadecimal, but it seems that too much of that is still apparent in the end user's hand in DCC controllers. RailPro, on the other hand, seems to have successfully abstracted the technical details of how the controller and decoder talk to each other behind a friendly touchscreen GUI (graphical user interface).
My original plan was to buy a DCC system (most likely Digitrax) and locomotives with pre-installed DCC decoders. That has now altered with an eye towards RailPro as my next control system. Since no manufacturer to date ships with RailPro decoders preinstalled I'll buy DC locomotives and install the decoder myself. However, since I'm planning to start small (see track plan in previous post) I'm not likely to have more than 1 locomotive any time soon, so I can actually start with an inexpensive DC locomotive and an inexpensive DC power pack and get up and running with minimal investment, and save up the money for a fancy control system when I have more than 12 feet of mainline.
The RailPro system seems reasonably priced for what it is -- US$300 for the controller, $60 for a basic decoder, $100 for a sound decoder. My only concern was for the apparently high price for the power supply: $270 for the 75W version. I brought up the issue of the price of the power supply with Ring Engineering, and since it's basically a good-quality DC power supply (with a radio repeater, reporting and auto-reverse module) I commented that I would be able to get a top-brand (e.g. Corsair, Seasonic, etc) computer ATX power supply for a quarter of the price of the Ring Engineering PWR-75 (even half the price of their newer cut-down PWR-56). Ring responded very quickly and raised some good points:
The common power supply, such as a PC power supply, is not designed
to be short-circuited. A model Railroad power supply is going to be
shorted when trains come off the rails, metal objects are
inadvertently put on the rails, etc. Therefore a model railroad
power supply has to be able to be short circuited regularly.
Further a model Railroad power supply should have auto recovery
after a short so it will power up without intervention after a short
is removed. A fused power (which is typical for commonly available
power supplies) would blow the fuse and you would have to replace
the fuse each time you accidentally shorted one rail to the other!
Even further, if more than one is used they must be designed to load
share. When a loco crosses a gap that isolates the two power
supplies the two power supplies become connected in parallel through
the locomotive! Most power supplies are not designed to be
paralleled. Some will even damage each other when connected in
parallel. Ring Engineering RailPro power supplies are designed to
be short circuited, have auto recovery, are designed to be
paralleled, and have special software and circuitry to do load
sharing when paralleled. Additionally, RailPro power supplies have
Direct Radio to allow then to be configured as a repeater, have
remote monitoring (such as real time power consumption), they have
overload protection and allow remote control of the output. Lastly
the proper voltage for HO scale is not readily available in common
power supplies. Our power supplies are calibrated to 14.5 volts.
Some incandescent bulbs are very sensitive to over voltage. A
little over voltage can drastically reduce their life span. So if
you choose a common 15-volt supply and it actually outputted 15.5
volts that is about 10% too much voltage which can have an
exponential impact on the life of bulbs. On the other hand if you
picked a common 12-volt supply the power on the motor would be much
less than 12 volts and the top speed of the locomotives would be
noticeably slow.
I'm not sure that any of the above is enough to stop me from trying (there's usually no shortage of ATX power supplies around a techie's house). For example, the over-current issue should be easily solved with the 1156 tail light bulb trick (see also MRH 2013-Mar p17). I plan on using an ATX power supply for layout power anyway, at least for accessory power.
I'll leave you with the two RailPro videos for your viewing pleasure.
The 6 people who have ever looked at this blog may have noticed I haven't posted anything for a couple years. Unfortunately the layout I was previously describing here fell victim to moving out of that house, not long after the last progress shots seen here. Since then I've been moving every month or two, so anything that doesn't fit in my (very small) car is not allowed, so no layout (even a Z-scale layout in a pizza box would be difficult to find room for). However, hope is starting to appear on the horizon: I expect to be able to stop roaming so much and be able to start again, with room for at least a modest layout. After starting and demolishing several layouts over recent years before they progress to anything even operational, I'm now firmly committed to a modular design of some kind. I have no plans to join up with anyone else's modules, but I have tentatively adopted the Free-mo standard as a guideline.
Inspired by M.C. Fujiwara's Shelf Layout Project in N scale from Model Railroad Hobbyist, November 2012 (page 100), in turn inspired by Byron Henderson’s “Alameda Belt Line”, I came up with this 12' x 2'8"
Two modules, each 6' long by 32" wide, designed as a linked pair. The
outside ends (one of each module) tapers to 24" endplates per the
(single-track) Free-mo specification.
The inner endplates also (mostly) conform to (dual-track) Free-mo
standards, although the end width, scenery and secondary tracks do not.
The "3-track yard" in the lower-right corner is the Walthers Car Float and Carfloat Apron.
HO Scale
12' x 2'8"
Minimum radius: 42"
Turnouts: #8 mainline, #6 industries
I was inspired by this post, so I decided to go ahead and install much of the fascia for the layout. It may be premature in some areas (no doubt I'll complain to myself at some point about lack of access to something), but is very necessary in other parts to start working on some basic scenery landforms.
The contours in the photo are obviously very rough; once the scenery profile is more determined I'll cut it to a nicer shape.
I now have track laid from the main (lower) yard, across the visible main line, to the top of the hill (sawmill yard), down the helix and back through the 4-track staging area, and linked back in with an optional continuous-run track (not used for normal operation, but nice to have for just letting a train run every now and then.
Roadbed is done up to the logging camp, and track is laid partway up, but I haven't yet finalized the track arrangement in the logging camp itself so I don't want to lay track too far and then have to move it.
Right on time (according to my prediction of two weeks ago) I've finally got the main line laid from the throat of the lower yard to the top of the hill, and then down the helix. All that remains is to lay the staging yard track (plus of course all the industrial track, two yards, and logging branch line). Budget prevents the acquisition of the quantity of switches required for the yards and industrial areas for a few more months, but the staging area and some sidings can hopefully be done this weekend. We'll see how it goes.
I actually managed to finish laying all of the cork for the entire main line tonight. Further progress on laying track is hindered by 4 turnouts I'm waiting for my local hobby shop to get in stock. I'm told they should be here by the end of the week (Thursday if I'm lucky). So I guess tomorrow's task is to figure out where the logging branch subroadbed should go.
Yes, I'm still here. I had to take a 2-month hiatus, so not much has progressed since last update, but now it's time to continue!
In this first shot, you can see the helix is complete (5 levels) and half capped with plywood for the lumber mill / helper turning yard. The rest of the plywood cap is on the floor ready to be placed.
Here's a shot a few days later with most of the cork laid out for the lumber mill yard.
That area is quite high off the ground (just below eye level for me) and from there the as-yet-unlaid lumber branch should gain another 6" or so of elevation, so I put in a raised floor to keep everything enjoyably viewable.
Due to a previous re-alignment of Marshall Hill, my original track plan for this area no longer fits, so I've had to scale it back a little; this is what the plan looks like now.
There are two major bridges that for now exist as bare subroadbed hanging in space, but will be replaced with more bridge-looking structures once the scenery starts to take shape.
As of tonight I have all of the subroadbed laid for the main line. The logging branch line, the paper mill complex, and the main yard are all 0% done. I have about 70% of the mainline cork laid, and about 50% of the track. If all goes according to plan, I hope to have the entire main line track laid by the end of the week, except for the staging yard, which will probably take another week. Soon after I want to rough in the logging branch (subroadbed at least). The I guess I need to start wiring so I can start running trains, right? :)
I ran my first train on the new layout last night :)
If you come from another layout, it's about as unexciting as you can get, but it's the first time I've had a layout working well enough to run a train any distance at all since July 2002, so I'm pretty excited.
The train was simply this Life-Like / Mantua 2-6-6-2T in Canadian Forest Products colours, along with 5 assorted cars from the cheap table at recent train shows. This locomotive is one of two DC locos I have, since I don't yet have my DCC system (I'm planning on getting an NCE PowerCab next month). In fact, I don't even have a proper DC power pack; I used an old industrial beast of a power supply (0-20VDC, 20A capacity) but it worked well enough to run the train. Simply swap the wires to reverse :)
I'm please to report no derailments or other track issues throughout the entire 48-foot (each way) run; forwards uphill and backwards downhill. No feeders run yet, just a pair of alligator clips at the end of the first rails and worked fine through 16 sections of flextrack (soldered joints on curves, which is 95% of the main line). This is the longest run between turnouts (which won't be soldered to adjacent track), excepting the helix.
Finally I get to lay some track! The distilled wisdom of the Internet has told me that nailing is bad, gluing is better, and gluing with caulking is the best. Transparent caulk is what I see recommended most often (so it's not unsightly if it peeks through the ballast), but I noticed some nice gray caulk at Rona (again, same DAP Alex+ brand) for the same price as the clear/white/almond/brown colours. I don't know what they put in it, but I found that the 300mL tubes of white-becomes-translucent and gray caulking are significantly different in weight. Indeed, the scale reveals: clear = 350g (12.3oz) whereas gray = 469g (16.5oz). I assume the differing ingredients make the gray caulking that much nicer to spread. For laying track I run a bead up each cork half-strip (approximately under where each rail will go) and then with a cheap putty knife spread it out into a smooth thin layer (1mm [~1/32"] is all you need). Just like icing a cake. Once the caulking is spread out thin and smooth, just plop the track on top if it and press down gently. The caulk is sufficiently sticky to keep the track in place with minimal clamping.
Backing up a bit; before getting to the sticking-it-down part, I first lay out 3-4 sections of flextrack at a time along the roadbed, pinned and/or clamped in place temporarily, then cut the rail ends as needed to fit the curves. Once satisfied with the alignment, I solder the rail ends together, but I don't solder in the curve -- I clamp the the end of the first track a few inches back from the end and let it straighten naturally, then attach the next section of track tangent to the end. This way both rail joints will be soldered perfectly straight and can then be bent into the curve. Attempting to solder in a curve is a great way to get kinked joints.
My soldering technique is far from perfect (as is my equipment), but what I do is clamp some alligator clips to the rail on either side of the joint as a heatsink, then apply the iron to rail+joiner on the outside of the rail and melt a small bit of rosin-core solder into the space between the rail joiner and the base of the rail. As soon as that melts, I take off the iron and blow it cool (to avoid melting ties). Then repeat on the other half of the joint. Once both rails are tinned, a third application of the iron blends the solder across the joint (if it wasn't already) and smooths out the appearance. I only solder on the outside of the joint to avoid any potential bumps and lumps where the wheels will roll.
At the end of the first day of tracklaying I have 33 feet of mainline down, from the yard, around the base of Marshall Hill and almost leading into the curve on the outside of the second level of the helix.
Apparently Atlas HO scale flextrack (specifically their code 83 Super Flex-83) has revisions. I happened to have two pieces side by side and noticed minor differences between what appears to be revisions "A" and "C".
On the underside of the track the most noticeable difference is the webbing between the ties. On "A" it is as wide as the base of the rail; on "C" it is about half as thick. The writing has also been reformatted a bit, but the only notable change is the revision letter. The other noticeable difference is the tie thickness has changed: on "A" each tie is 2.35mm (0.0925" = 8" scale), on "C" it is 2.20mm (0.0866" = 7.5" scale). A minor difference to be sure, but it can definitely be seen when they're side by side.
The other, odder difference is on the top side. The spike detail has changed. Where it gets weird is that on one side of the track the spike detail got finer. "A" spikes are 0.75mm wide (0.0295" = 2.6" scale), but on "C" one side has finer 0.6mm (0.0236" = 2.0" scale) spikes, but the other side has clunky 0.95mm (0.0374" = 3.25" scale) spikes!
For comparison, the spikes on the classic Atlas code 100 flextrack are a massive 1.75mm (0.0689" = 6" scale) on 3.4mm (0.1339" = 11.7" scale) ties).
Has anyone else noticed this? Any idea why they did that? Of note, the finer spike detail is on the fixed rail and the coarser spike detail is on the sliding rail.
05-Dec-2010 update: I found some revision "B" track in my collection. It looks superficially similar to "A" track, I haven't bothered to pull out the calipers to see if any of the dimensions differ, but they look very close. I have attached a scan of both top and bottom for reference.
My first order of track came in a couple days earlier than expected, so I now have an assortment of switches to play with to get final alignment of some unlaid segments of spline subroadbed, as well as final alignment of the cork roadbed. For track, I opted for Walthers/Shinohara code 83 DCC-enhanced switches combined with Atlas Superflex code 83 flextrack. One disadvantage of this combination is that while the rails are both 0.083" tall, the Atlas ties are 0.020" thicker than the Shinohara track (apparently this is so that Atlas code 100 and code 83 track come out to the same railhead height). What that means for me is I need to find a source of inexpensive 0.020" (0.5mm) material (possibly sheet styrene?) to use as a shim under all the turnouts.
A quick trip to the local Rona showed that there is plenty of inexpensive silicone caulking available. I picked up several tubes of DAP Alex+ clear caulking for $2/tube. Well, "clear" is yet to be confirmed; according to the label it applies white (this I can confirm) and cures to clear after 7-14 days (we'll see). If it does indeed go clear then I'll use it to attach the track to the cork. Alternately, it does come in several other colours (white, almond (very light brown), dark brown and gray. If the "clear" caulking isn't to my liking, I'll use the grey one for attaching track; the colour should be very close to ballast colour.
The wisdom the Internet had revealed to me showed that the standard strategy for gluing down cork with caulking is to lay down a bead on the subroadbed and spread it with a putty knife. This worked, but I found it a little messy. I tried applying a bead directly to the underside of the cork strip, not spreading it, and applying the cork to the subroadbed and pressing in place. For my particular subroadbed construction this seems to work very well, as there are some minor irregularities between the triples of spline and Styrofoam strips, and with the bead of caulking on the cork directly, pressed firmly in place, the caulk seems to fill in all the necessary gaps without excessive spillover. On the subject of subroadbed irregularities, despite my best efforts there is inevitably some variation in top level of the 6 hardboard splines and 3 Styrofoam strips, but a Stanley Surform Pocket Plane is a fabulous tool for quickly smoothing it all out.
So, by the end of the night I'd emptied a box of cork (25x 3-foot sections) which accounts for about a third of the mainline. Next on the hitlist (now that I have actual physical track turnouts to check alignment with) is finishing the last piece of mainline subroadbed, the passing siding on the top of Marshall Hill. After that I can continue laying cork for most of the mainline and then (hopefully) onto track sometime next week!
Work continues. I've got most of the main line spline subroaded laid out now. I can't join it to the helix until the helix is built to all 5 levels, and I can't build the helix until I get my order of track in. I also can't exactly position the subroadbed for the sidings and spurs until I get the track in, so I'm a little stuck until the end of the week. Nevertheless, I have experimented with attaching two sections of cork roadbed; one with white glue to plywood in the helix; the other with white latex caulk to the splines. The caulk is admirably tacky, it takes very little effort to keep it in place in the correct alignment.
I attached a rough printout of the planned 4-foot truss arch bridge (to be based on CPR's Stoney Creek Bridge). It gives some sense of the chasm to be spanned. I remember there was an excellent article on building exactly such a bridge in the April 1991 issue of Model Railroader Magazine. Unfortunately I sold my 50-year collection of MR about 10 years ago, now I'll need to find a copy of that issue somewhere (although I can always order from the publisher if the train shows don't yield results).
Based on feedback from LKandO, and my own dissatisfaction with the original design (especially the proximity of the yard throat to the mountain at the bottom-right), I've completely reworked the arrangement of the yard. Compare to plan in previous blog post. Key changes:
turntable moved from end of yard to entrance of yard.
horseshoe curve no longer contain storage tracks, just two approach tracks (30", 27") and a switching lead (24")
found room to put back in the car float (apron at least, float would be removable off-layout) I had originally conceived in a much-earlier design
quite importantly, design is now based on actual measurements of the space with backdrop and benchwork in place (previously was just rough dimesions, not counting the 6"+ lost to backdrop etc).
Skipping ahead a bit to current events: the mainline roadbed has progressed, at least in partial form, from the helix around the loop at the other end of the room (around the future logging camp) and back around to the upper level loop around the top of Marshall Hill (center of room). I had planned to offset the two loops somewhat so that the lower track could be at least partially visible (not entirely in a tunnel), but with the upper roadbed temporarily in place it became obvious that the small offset I had allowed would not allow any reasonable hill slope (or even a vertical cliff) in most places. Fortunately I also realized that the aisle next to the helix was 39" wide, far larger than my standard 24", so I decided to cut down the aisle by extending the lower track loop outward. The lower track should now be able to stay exposed for 75% of its circle, only entering a tunnel where I actually wanted a tunnel in any case.
In the photo the old roadbed is still there (with a piece of flextrack pinned in place), and the new path of the lower track roughed in about a foot to the right.
The track plan had always included a helix, but I hadn't really planned on putting it in place until later on in the construction process. The track runs from the main yard at one end of the room, eventually to the terminal at the other end, having climed nearly 30" via 3 lengths of the room and 4 loops, but the helix is simply to return from the upper terminal to the hidden staging area (and optionally back to the main yard and/or continuous running). However, I realized that the second loop out coincides with the location of the helix and that at the very least I needed the exact location of the helix determined so that I could lay roadbed for the mainline around it. But I quickly realized that the mainline at that point coincided nicely with the second level of the helix in location, curvature and slope, so I decided to simply double the width of the second-level helix roadbed pieces to have a 3/4-circle of double track.
The helix itself is 4.5 turns of 28" radius, rising 4" per turn (width of a 2x4 on edge for spacers, plus 5/8" plywood roadbed), for a slope of (4" / 2•28"•π) 2.7%, which is about average for the entire main line. The roadbed is 4"x24" strips of 5/8" plywood, cut at 22.5° angles at each end. The wider second level deck (not pictured here, yet) is the same idea, but extended to 7.5" width to accomodate a 30.5" radius track on the outside. Spacer blocks are cut from 2x4s, with 45° angles on both ends to make an isosceles trapezoid shape (about 5" on the long side, 1.5" on the short side). You can see how they're laid out in the photo, alternating inside and outside placement. This provides a relatively large support area for the levels above, while still providing plenty of clearance from the 28"-radius track. The only issue I'm mildly concerned about is alignment on the inside edge of the roadbed joints. The outside is nicely supported across both pieces, but the inside is floating, and any warping of the wood would throw it out of alignment. I think I'll simply glue on a splice plate of 1/8" hardboard under the joint to ensure vertical alignment. Even with cork, track, and splice that still leaves 3" of clearance.
I had experimented with spline roadbed construction on a previous layout that never as far as track laying (had to move before then) and liked how it worked, so I'm doing that again. My method is a little different from anyone else's I've seen. 1/4" hardboard would probably be the better choice, but I had a supply of 1/8" hardboard so that's what I'm using. I make a sandwich of hardboard and Styrofoam: two triple laminations of hardboard strips (one under each rail), with a strip of 1/2" Styrofoam in the middle for spacing, and then another strip of 1/2" Styrofoam down each outside to widen the roadbed (including as a scenery attachment point). It's all held together with yellow carpenter's glue, and I have no issues with adhesion, it's as solid as could be desired.
So how to cut all these strips? The hardboard I ripped into 7/8"-wide strips by first ripping two 4'x8' sheets of hardboard into four 2'x8' sections, then with the edges lined up, drill through all four strips and bolt them together so they can't move relative to each other. So I effectively had a 2'x8' sheet of 1/2"-thick (4-ply) hardboard. I then rigged up this guide frame & support with a 2x4 and some 1x4's on each end of my bench saw, carefully aligned with the rip fence, so I could then just set the stack of hardboard on one end and slide it through the saw without worrying much about alignment. It worked very well, all the strips came out nice and straight and uniform width.
But sawing hardboard produces dust. Lots and lots and lots of dust. A dust mask and eye protection are essential. This is what my saw looked like after ripping 4x24 8-foot strips, and that's with the shop vac hooked up to suck dust away. There was more than a grocery bag of dust just on the floor immediately under the saw, not counting all the dust floating around over everything. This is something that should ideally be done outside or somewhere well-ventilated which you don't care if you get dirty.
In the end I had a big pile of hardboard strips all set aside ready for installation. Now I needed to figure out how to cut 1/2" Styrofoam into uniform strips. I rigged up this simple contraption with 3 blades. I found that trying to cut the whole 1/2" at once was too much, but cutting 3/16" or so with each blade lets the sheet slide through smooth and easy. I just have this rig screwed to the wall and it's extremely easy to cut strips of Styrofoam from the 2'x8' sheet.
Then it's just a matter of sticking it all together. Pretty simple, really, as long as you have clamps. Lots and lots of clamps. I found these beautiful ones (oversized clothes pins) at the dollar store (10-pack for a dollar, can't beat that) and they have about a 2" opening (enough for almost all of it, but can't quite clamp with the last layer of Styrofoam on the outside. The inner notch just below the hinge is perfect for starting out, it provides tremendous clamping power for up to 3/8", which coincidentally is just the size of each set of hardboard splines, then the end of the jaws can hold the hardboard-foam sandwich together just nicely. I do also have some heavier-duty spring clamps and C-clamps, especially for the ends of each spline on curves where a lot of clamping pressure is needed to keep it from springing out of alignment.
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