SouthCo Rotolocks were an incredible find for all the recent layouts at our club, Astolat Model Railway Club in Guildford. These often get a lot of interest when we have layouts on show so I figured it would be worth while writing about them as a future reference.
Manufactured by SouthCo and available in the UK via RHF they provide a simple, strong, quick and effective way to join 2 base boards together mechanically and allow us to put layouts together in minutes as opposed to hours. A pair of locks cost roughly £10 – yes that’s more than a nut and bolt but we think the benefits are worth it.
Product code is R2-0259-17 and R2-0257-17 – they don’t appear via their search on rhf.co.uk but you can order via email.
At the club, a work in progress layout Savernake can be assembled in approximately 30 minutes and it’s quite sizeable, approximately 30 boards in total.
The locks have a male/female side and are available in a deep or shallow tab model (drawing available at https://files.southco.com/static/JDrawing/J-R2-1.pdf) – we use the shallow tab that have an 17.3mm distance from the front edge of the lock to the fixing lug – conveniently the depth of a laminate of 3 6mm pieces of plywood – provided the locks finish inside the joining face that’s fine – giving us 0.7mm on each lock assuming a nominal 18mm laminate of ply provides enough movement to pull nice and tight.
The male lock(left) has an 8mm hex opening to receive a wrench to actuate the mechanism.
Which, when a female lock is locate along side, captures the female and tightens up on it to provide a 623kgf ultimate tensile load and 907kgf sheer load (https://files.southco.com/static/TestDataSheet/TD-ROTO-J.pdf) creating an almost rigid structure between the 2 boards.
We design our baseboards to have a slot for the wrench to be used from the lower side of the board
The female only needs a slot in the face for the lock
Here’s how easy they are in use – assuming you can locate the wrench in the hole – right, Colin?
We’ve also choose to use Rotolocks for the joining of our clubs new modular layout. Working with Grainge and Hodder, they provided us with a custom version of their 900×600 boards and 600×600 with a standard face employing Rotolocks (standardised with the female on the right of the boards) along with pattern makers dowels to locate.
and then when clamped together from below
and here’s our 3 modular boards joined end to end – with a male set facing outwards to join onto the next members layout.
The manufacturers datasheet is available at https://southco.com/en_gb_int/r2-0259-02
