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Technique for building Allied style 3 piece Individual Track Links

Part 4 assembly part 2:

Step 4 is applying the glue to the connector. I use a popsicle stick with a piece of tape on it to hold the connector in place. These pieces are very small and I hate looking around on the floor for them. I place a small bit of super glue on my applicator. 

For the applicator I use a tool I found in the leatherworking section of a craft store. It is made for poking holes in leather but its sharp point is great for applying small bits of superglue, and best of all it cost less than $2.00. 

Always glue the parts the same way each time so that the tracks will look consistent. I always glue from left to right because that seems simplest. This means you glue your connectors to the last tread piece in your track run allowing the next piece to swing freely.

Step 5 is to place the connector onto the previously placed tread piece and wait for the glue to dry enough to continue.

Step 6 is to place the next tread piece into the connector you just glued, remember since I'm building a flexible track, I don't use any glue to hold this tread piece into place. I allow the pins only to hold it so that it moves fairly freely.

Step 7 is to apply glue to the next connector piece (again only in 1 of the holes) and put into place and allow to dry.

One thing to remember is to use caution when you are pressing the connectors onto the treads. You will always need to keep the pressure on both sides of the track the same otherwise you may at best wind up with a crooked track or at worst break previously glued links.

Step 8 is to repeat until the track run is finished. I build in runs of 10 to 14 tread pieces since this is what my tweezers will hold down nicely. Then when I have several runs built I glue them together using connectors. Since they get to long for my tweezers to hold down I use a straight edge to keep the runs flat while gluing them together.

Part 5 my Rant on Individual track links:

Since starting the track links on this project, I have at times been ready to give up and go find some rubber band type tracks, and go "the easy route", but in the end after many hours of frustration, I finally found a way that "clicked" and now doing these tracks for me has become easy and enjoyable. Although I will admit that I find cleaning up the pieces tedious and boring. 

In the end I really like how they look on the model and I hope that some may profit from this article and not have to go through as many problems as I did to find this method. 

I will end now by showing one of my completed tracks minus the paint of course and invite all out there to discuss this technique and add any helpful ideas that they use for this style of track. 

Delbert Davis
http://home.ceinetworks.com/~delbert3/index.html