Progress on quartering

Yesterday was Abingdon Show. I'm not sure how they did. There were plenty of people queuing to get in right at the beginning but it never got to being heaving, which is actually a good thing.

I was pleased with Mospick Halt which ran well all day. One nice lady described as lovely and clean. That just makes me want to make it dirtier :-)

Now the show is over and there are no more exhibition bookings it is time to make some real progress on 3mm locos. As I mentioned before it looked like the quartering was out on the Watford Tank. I broke the superglue holding the wheels on and fiddled until I got it right. I've also made a piece of test track for the rolling road and it works! Just having a flat piece of track for the rolling road to sit on makes a huge difference.

All I have to do now is cure why it waddles like a duck.

Abingdon Show and Mospick Halt

It's March so it must be Abingdon show. It's at the White Horse Leisure Centre and I can see it from my lab at Sophos. I'm taking Mospick Halt and a friend from Oxford Club is coming to help operate. Well actually he will probably operate whilst I wander round trying not to spend money.

I've finished 'Joan'. I need to find some etched nameplates for both locos and then they will be done, though maybe a coat of varnish won't go amiss.

If you come to the show then do come and say hello. I'd tell you the stand number but I seem to have mislaid the paperwork...

Chassis Building Part 37465

I was determined that I would build an engine in 3mm. Surely it can't be that hard! I've talked before about building a chassis and I thought I had it cracked when I got to adding the wire pickups. I put in on the stretch of track that is supposed to be a layout and it stuttered along so I thought it would bed in. It didn't.

I decided it was time to invest in a rolling road. Gave the nice people at Finney and Smith some dosh and I have the rolling road (told her indoors it was a Valentines present from her to me....).

The rolling road is great but all it confirmed is that the chassis runs well in one direction but doesn't go at all in the other and if it does go, it uses twice as much current and the motor gets hot.

I think you can see the problem in the picture. The other side of the engine has the cranks perfectly horizontally in line. This side is definitely not 90 degrees, more like 85 degrees or less.

Now I have to break all the superglue that holds it together and see if I can correct it.

BTW I didn't have any track to hand so I held the rolling road together with brass tube and Royal Mail elastic bands - simplicity itself.

Test Track on Chertonwell

Yesterday was Risex 2010 and we were exhibiting Chertonwell. It's a nice show with good mix of layouts, traders and demonstrations. Phil Parker popped in and commented on the test track we have on Chertonwell so I thought I would say how we did it. He has beaten me to an actual blog on the subject here.

On Chertonwell we run a lot of trains. Normally there will be 10 at any one time. Over a day that amounts to some 70 train hours of continuous running. As a result they can get dirty and need a good clean.

We decided that somewhere to clean engines would be good. What I did was take a piece of chipboard which was cut in two and had the corners cut off. I edged it so that items couldn't roll off - didn't stop us losing a spring yesteday which escaped whilst dismantling a loco. The board is hinged down the middle, In the picture you can see the timber in the centre of the board with hinges on top so it folds flat.

I glued settrack to it so I didn't have to fight the springing of flexitrack and the wires go to two banana sockets. Just over on the right you can see the flexible wiring to allow the board to close. The board bolts to the layout when in use by the coach bolt whose wing nut can be seen at the rear. The layout has a separate controller built in, the controls being to the left of the photo.

We literally bolt in on and plug in two banana connectors and it's ready to go. The only addition since first use is a resisitor that allow the current flow to the loco to be measured. Very useful for seeing whether any current is actually flowing.

It's a really useful feature of the layout and we would be lost without it.

Wiring Woes

After the last (and first) outing of Mospick Halt I decided I should put a power LED visible somewhere along with the short LED. The controller has a short LED on it so all I needed to do was unsolder it and run wires up to the control panel area.

The power LED was equally easy, find an LED, use good old Ohms Law to determine a suitable resistor, wire them to the power feed, a quick test and put the layout away.

The completion of the next engine meant a quick run was in order. Unfortunately what I discovered was the power LED flashes when the engine is running in one direction and is completely off when the engine runs in the other direction. Not only does the LED flash but the engine slows down gently instead of suddenly when the controller was turned off. I had done something seriously wrong.

In the end it was quite simple. I had wired one side of the LED to the power bus on the layout but the other side got wired to one of the track output wires. I had used confusing terminology under the layout. All the wires go to tag strips that are labeled but my choice of names was not good!

I took the opportunity to separate out the lights on the layout onto their own switch. Previously they were on all the time but they will be hardly noticed at exhibitions so it made sense to be able to turn them off and save carbon emissions somewhere.

Joan

The last exhibition showed the need for a good 3rd engine. I had the Chivers Finelines RC17 Welshpool & Llanfair Joan kit sat in a box, so out it came.

The kit was designed to go on a Minitrix chassis but I had bought a couple of the Dapol 2-6-2 tanks when they were cheap on the OO9 Society Second Hand stall so these were an obvious choice for conversion to an 0-6-2.

Removing the body and pony trucks showed that I just needed to lift the coils and capacitors and make a larger hole in the footplate and it would be a perfect fit. I needed to remove a locating lug so I sawed that off and promptly sawed through one of the wires which are ever so tiny and delicate. A repair by my good friend Bob had it running again in no time.

The body was cleaned up and glued with superglue gel. Working with whitemetal is so easy. No fiddling with soldering irons unless you want to and it is easy to file and to fill. The whole kit took only a couple of hours time to put together.

One nice touch was the coupling hook on the rear which I was able to superglue into the NRMA standard socket on the trailing pony truck. It provides the necessary movement on tight bends and was easier to do than expected.

I've made one mistake in not putting the fixing nuts in place early on but I reckon I can still do that. The picture shows the completed body with a few gaps to fill with putty. After that it's a case of clean it up and take it into the garden and spray it.

Hopefully this will all be done in time for Abingdon show in early March.

Working Lights

After a successful outing to the Beds and Bucks 009 Open Day it was time to finish off the lights. I had worked out the best combination of lights and resistor, in this case 2 lights with one 220 ohm resistor should give good life expectancy on the bulbs without too much heat loss dissipation from the resistor. You can manage without a resistor but it does help limit the current should something go wrong one day in the future.

Underneath the layout all wires go to terminal pads. These are simply made from copper clad board that has been sawn into strips and then had grooves added. The pads are flooded with solder whilst on the bench and as many as needed are glued to the underside of the board. To glue the pads I used glue sticks from electric glue guns but melted with the soldering iron - it was out ready.

The wires were all soldered on and then came the moment of truth - power was applied. All worked well for about 5 seconds before pairs of bulbs started flickering. What had I done! Power off quickly. This is where the resistor should have helped to limit the current. After much head scratching I realised that I had used liquid flux when soldering the wires and resistors to the pads. Not all the flux had evaporated so I ended up with liquid lying over the pads and starting to conduct in interesting ways. Dried it all off and it works fine.

In a moment of serendipity Phil Parker has an article this month in Hornby Magazine about soldering. It's a good read and after a brief email exchange I discovered that he would not typically use separate flux in electrical wiring. My belt and braces approach brought it all on myself!