Tips for the Layout: Hanging Wire

If your layout is like most model railroaders, you've got a rat's nest of wires underneath it and it's sometimes hard to find the one that you're looking for. This tip will help you keep things in order. And it's by using inexpensive shower curtain hooks. Shower curtain hooks are available at hardware stores at Target at dollar stores. They're kind of keyhole shaped, though you can get round ones.

They open up very easily and close to, to hold those wires in there very good. To mount them to your layouts you'll use screw eyes. Screw eyes, again, available at hardware stores. You can get them in a variety of different sizes. You don't need very large ones because all they're doing is holding those shower hooks in there.

To get the, the screw eyes into your layout, you can drill a pilot hole and you can spend an awful lot of time screwing them in by hand. But, I made an inexpensive tool out of a screwdriver bit by just grinding a little groove into it like that, that fits around the, the screw eye. You, you put your screw eye into your pilot hole and then you use something like a motorized screwdriver or a drill, and just screw that right in there. An even easier way to put these things in, it doesn't even involve making yourself a bit, it's by using a piece of bent heavy wire. You just chuck this into your electric drill, put your, put that into the, the eye of the screw eye, turn on the electric drill slow and that will screw the screw eye right in there.

And voila, you've got places to hang your wiring from. It's very easy to open this up, to grab any particular wire that you may need to solder to, solder onto or replace. And one last tip is while you're down there, label those wires. Get yourself a label maker. Label the wires every couple of feet so that when you're under the layout, you can find exactly that 12 volt wire that you're looking for.