Better Way to Glue

Model Train Sets

Train sets are one of the most popular toys to play with for kids and adults.

Some train sets come with battery operated or electric operated engines which can be a lot of fun to set up and watch. With curves and hills, long trains can get into trouble – falling off the tracks.

With SQOTS™ your imagination is the only limit to the way you can help your long trains stay on the tracks. Prior to adding our guide rails using SQOTS™ the train track configuration we had  could only have a train length of two(2) carriages before the trains would derail. Using SQOTS™ and some imagination we had trains with nine (9) carriages running around and they looked great!  See the video clip below.

Our first idea was to make guide rails either side of a humped incline section of the track – the place the trains derailed the most.  Without the guides the humps were causing the carriages to rock from one side to another and usually fall on their side.  We made our guide rails using Craft sticks (Coloured icy-pole sticks).  We cut the sticks with scissors, then using single SQOTS™ we added one cut stick at a time to the sides of the track.  To significantly increase the strength we then added a complete stick horizontally (it then looked like a guide rail fence) – we also used SQOTS™ for this though you might be better off using simple wood glue for that step (though that can be messy. The results looked great and it was an activity in of its own taking maybe one hour. We then decided to use some home technology to accelerate the process.

Here are three pictures showing before and after our SQOTS™ project (more pictures below).

Train Problem02 the solution03 the solution

 

Materials and Procedure:

We looked for pictures of Craft sticks on the internet.  We used a simple free graphics editor to create a similar guide rail pattern to the one we made with real craft sticks.  We did a little scaling of our graphics and printed out rows of guide rails onto an A4 sheet of paper.
We then laminated the A4 sheet of Paper with a simple laminator; you can get a simple laminator from office supplies stores or even supermarkets (perhaps $30.00).  The pouches we had and used were silver/mirror on one side which was great – though plain ones would have been fine.

Well from there it was a cutting matt / scissors and more craft time – hey presto a record breaking train length and a much more exciting train set to play with.  Note these laminated guide rails were flexible and perfect for the inside and outside of curves.

 

NOTE: We do not know if the manufacturers of the train sets ever considered the possibility of their electric train engines carrying such amazingly long loads continuously for such long times, so it just may be that this could strain your train engine.  We cannot take responsibility for any resultant train engine strain problems – its just a fun idea we played around with.. and do on most days now.

 


The SQOTS™ range of products, which we describe as dots of glue, square dots of glue, tiles of glue, square self-adhesive dots and other phrases that have the words dots or glue, is not affiliated with or associated with any dots of glue manufacturers, representative, affiliates or websites promoting or selling their products with trademarks or trade names that include or consist of the common phrase description “glue dots”.