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Home First Look About Peter Wright Products Ordering Contact Us
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I originally trained as a teacher of Design and Technology in the early sixties at Shoreditch TC. As part of the course I learned the skills of jewelry manufacture and eventually acquired my own hallmark. The next thirty odd years were spent in a variety of schools in the Midlands.My designs for turnouts were originally conceived in the winter of 2002. My wife was gradually losing her battle with arthritis and needed more of my time to cope with day to day life.I had retired early and I needed a challenge to keep the grey matter ticking over in between bouts of cooking and hoovering. It had to be something that would fit in comfortably with my caring role and utilise my craft and design skills. Back in 1977 I built an N gauge layout for my son,and I had seen some Z gauge locos for the first time at the local model shop. I decided that they would be too small for little fingers to cope with and went with N gauge. Recalling the memory of Z gauge all those years later I set about finding out what was available,in the way of information,on the internet.After reading many, many comments on the Z forums it became increasingly obvious that there was a need for turnouts that not only worked well but had a more prototypical look and feel to them.Just what I was looking for. The first prototypes were fairly crude. At that stage I was concentrating mainly on trying, not only to turn a concept into realality, but also struggling to work out how to produce turnouts in a relatively economical way. Once I had managed to produce a viable turnout my next step was to test it. Very difficult to do with no loco nor any means of controlling it. I went back to the forums. One name that seemed to appear regularly in the forums was John Cubbin. His posts seemed to be full of sensible arguments and he was scathing about the available turnouts. I decided to contact John and suggested that I had a viable turnout ready for production. I think at first he thought I was just another mad Brit. However that changed when I sent him a prototype turnout. With John's help I continued to develop the design and produced the preproduction models that were sent,for testing,to selected people.Encouraged by the response I decided to go ahead and offer the turnouts for sale.Without John's encouragement I doubt that any turnouts would have been produced. Over the years the original design has been revised and updated several times. Most of these revisions have been concerned with methods of production. In the original design, each tie structure was cast individually and the rails threadied into place. The frog/point rails unit was then glued in positon after carefully threading the exit rails into place. Producing the tie structure was very time consuming and also very messy as each spikehead had to be filled with resin to ensue a good result. As each mould would only produce six good structures it was not really a cost effective method. Also a great deal of care was required to ensure that the exit rails were true. I then looked at the possibilty of casting the rails and the tie structure as one. The advantages were quicker production times and more accurate positioning of the exit rails. But the frog/point rails unit would still have to be glued in place separately. The moulding medium that I had been using proved to be too soft for this method so I had to research more suitable materials. Generally this method was superior to the previous one but still required care in positioning the frog unit. The latest revision seems to have overcome all of the known problems of production. All the rails and the frog/point rails unit are now cast directly as one,albeit in two stages.The construction time has been reduced and the rails are posioned with greater accuracy. I have also introduced another design which is compatible with MTL rails.This has a Marklin footprint and was designed to aid the replacement of non MTL turnouts in existing layouts. A lot of credit for the production of this design must be given to Jeff Merrill and Loren Snyder. They provided a lot of encouragement and tested the preproduction turnouts. More recently I have been working with Rodger Main and Neil Parkhouse to develop a 3 Way Turnout and a Double Slip. The design of the throwbar assembly for the 3 way proved to be quite complex but now seems to be working well. | |
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