OK, so its been some months now without progress, multiple business trips and vacations got in the way. Anyway, the completed order for the turnout controls was received and we are ready to make some real progress.
After doing a review of the module and planning what configuration of controls to use where, I'm proceeding on building up most of the controls, reserving a few to be built last so as to cover my bases in case I misjudged my counts of each configuration.
I'm using wood glue to assemble the units and I find the work relatively relaxing when doing them in a mini-assembly line method.
One thing that I spent a lot of time thinking about during my planning was how the turnout control cable position, i.e. pushed in or pulled out, will relate to the position of the points on the module. Most importantly, can the positions be set up that it will be self-evident to the operator what the knob position means?
I decided that I would attempt to align the knob in/out position with the position of the points on the turnout relative to the outside of the mainline. For example, the turnout points would be pushed toward the inside of the mainline when the knob was similarly pushed in (away) from the operator. When pulled out, the points will be pulled toward the outside of the mainline. As will be seen, this will impact the route that the control cables must take to realize this relationship of knob position to points as the turnout control itself reverses cable movement relative to the points movement. And, if you use the horizontal configuration, that is once again reversed resulting in cable movement relative to points movement being the same (overall not reversed :0).