N Scale Hi Rail - Retro Hollow Core Door Layout

[Point353]

Now I can ... maybe start some ballasting.

Are you planning to use "vintage" materials?

[wm3798]

Well, I have a bag of Lichen and some John's Ballast...  anyone remember that stuff?

[Doug G.]

I still have a can of that same ballast cement and a couple of boxes of Life-Like red and gray rock from when my brother had his HO layout in the sixties. A box of lichen too that's like rock.

Doug

[wm3798]

Did a little wiring at the PawPaw end of the door. 


The left side of the layout can now be fleshed out with more scenery and details.

Lee

[wm3798]

Work bench discussion brought this to mind...  my desk has a limited work surface, and I tend to sit back a bit to see what I'm doing, creating a rather large escape route for coupler springs, small wheels and other such fiddledy bits...


Recalling that I have some drawer glide hardware out in the garage, I cobbled together a simple slide out to solve both problems.



I'll probably put some felt on it to reduce the bounce factor and improve visibility.

Lee

[wm3798]

Picked up a couple of diameters of brass tubing at Ye Olde Hobbytown today, without the benefit of a cracked gear in my pocket.  Hopefully I got something close to see if I can mend the truck gears in...
My Bachmann Mike and the E-60, as well as another 0-4-0 shifter I have in the bin.

Stay tuned...
Lee

[peteski]

Picked up a couple of diameters of brass tubing at Ye Olde Hobbytown today, without the benefit of a cracked gear in my pocket.  Hopefully I got something close to see if I can mend the truck gears in...
My Bachmann Mike and the E-60, as well as another 0-4-0 shifter I have in the bin.

Stay tuned...
Lee

I ended up picking up couple of Bachmann Auto Train U36Bs at the Springfield show. They belong to a fellow NTRAK club memer and need to be serviced.  Most of the geared axles are cracked. Bith white ad black have the same problem.



I will also use the brass sleeve (tubing) fix.  The closest I found was 1/8" thin-wall (0.006") brass tubing from Special Shapes Co. (IIRC, no longer in business).  But the outside diameter of the Bachmann axle tube is a bit too large to fit in the brass tubing, so my plan is to slightly turn down the plastic axle tubes on my lathe (until the are press fit inside the tubing).  I am also planning on documented my repair.

[wm3798]

Zoom!

[Rich_S]

Zoom!

Hi Lee,  I had never thought about cutting re-railers so you could use them with turnouts / switches, very neat idea. 

[wm3798]

Necessity is the mother of invention!

Lee

[Doug G.]

It doesn't matter what color Bachmann gears are, they will all crack. A very poor design.

Doug

[peteski]

Lee,  if your E60 is still on your to-fix list, send me its trucks and I''ll take care of the cracked axles.  PM me and I'll give you my address.

[wm3798]

I can do that... but let me take a stab at it first. 
The next piece of the puzzle is on its way, a new 5 pole Life Like motor...(anyone want to buy a sh!tty GP38-2 dummy?)
My plan is to reinforce the bendy drive shafts with some brass tubing, upgrade the motor, and fix the gears.
I'm hoping to have a beast of a locomotive to haul some amtoobs around the layout here shortly.

Lee

[wm3798]

But in the mean time...


Hey Budd!

Newly arrived today.
Lee

[wm3798]

As posted previously, I'm the proud new owner of a set of ConCor RDCs. (One powered, three trailers).
I had a set of these many years ago, and I'm suddenly reminded why I dispensed with them early on.

The drive is akin to the bad Roco/Mehano drive used in their SD50/SD40/SD45, wherein there is a lot of slop in the gearing, to the point where the worm flops about and fails to fully engage the main drive gear in the truck.

So far I've experimented with some shims to see if I could get the gears to maintain better contact, but I'm thinking the next step might be to harvest some larger worm gears from the parts bin and see if that helps.  Before I do that, I'll do a complete tear down and inspection of the parts to see if there's not something more obvious that's failing.

@spookshow  speaks glowingly of the performance, so I'm wondering, given its age, if the gears in there are simply worn out and loosing contact.  We shall see once the exploratory gets underway.

I'd really like to get these properly on the road.  They will be a nice complement to the PC Metroliner that I've revived (using an all new drive from Tomix... let's hope we don't have to get that extreme here).  They came to me as a like new set of undecs, cleverly packaged in a bubble wrap lined old VHS case...Well played in the reduce/reuse/recycle department.  I also have the decals necessary to put them into commuter service on the B&O.

These retro projects are really starting to pile up!
Lee