For a number of my turnouts, I went the route of pneumatics to control them. All was working well until I buried them in gravel. I am using gravel as my fill and apparently it is in fact sharp enough to puncture and affect the tubing. Any suggestions on how best to protect the tubing?
I had a similar problem with the irrigation tubing on my layout. Critters were chewing through it. My solution was to run the tubing through 1/2" or 3/4" copper pipe, mainly where it crossed under the layout. I did that in several spots. Though PVC pipe may have worked too. I had the copper pipe on hand at the time.
I designed a welding fixture for truck axles many moons ago. it was set up on trunions for automatic welding. all of the pneumatic lines were covered in a braided stainless steel sheath.
what may be the simplest way to protect on your railroad would be to get a larger plastic tube to run them inside.
Al P.
Echoing Al, maybe a tough plastic tubing such as HDPE, large enough to easily snake your tube through, such as this:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003M1444W
Maybe LDPE would work,
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CANXZ1A
I’m not sure how these will react to long-term UV exposure though, maybe someone else here knows.
I think old garden hoses would be adequate protection.
I used to repair pvc irrigation lines and we always removed all rocks from our trenches and back filled with sand, because rocks move.
1/2 PVC conduit rigid or flexible …the big box stores have it… just and idea …
Depending how far you want to run the tubing through a one piece chase (conduit, pipe, etc)it will be almost impossible to push.
You need an electricians snake or tape the end of your tubing to a stiff wire and try pushing that first.
Split loom tubing might help as well. No snake required.
3/8 " ID black poly garden irrigation / sprinkler tubing. Cheap, flexible, easy cut. and you can even feed some track feeders thru it, if your so inclined…
Dave
When I used to build cables for printing equipment, I would have to snake tubing and a cable through a flexible conduit. Spraying the tubing and cable with a soap and water solution made pulling the stuff through the conduit a LOT easier.
We used something like this for our cables.
The above ideas work. Here’s another extra layer of protection against damage by shovel.
I once worked on a construction project on a military base. In the trench, a few inches above the buried cable, or in this case, the buried ‘armored tubing’, we had to lay a red plastic tape saying ‘caution buried cable’. You can find similar yellow caution tape at the building supply store. When digging years later, you know you are close to the pipe when this pops out of the ground first in your shovel of dirt.
Thanks. When it comes to digging this wont’ be an issue. My railroad is built using SplitJaw’s PVC roadbed. All the current tubing is actually attached to the underside of these PVC boards. The issue however is if I backfil gravel up to the bottom of the PVC boards, the gravel apparently can cut up the tubing. It looks like some sort of tubing, either rigid PVC pipe, or something flexible will be the way to go to protect the pneumatic hose from getting damaged.