Himself is getting very bored of wheel cleaning!
And the bad news is he's only halfway through scraping all the crud off the tyres of the carriage fleet ahead of Model Rail Scotland later this month.
It's worth doing, however, because there's no point cleaning the loco wheels and the track only to leave a fresh mucky trail on the rails with every train that passes.
Whilst testing the locomotives he noticed the KMX tamper wasn't picking up on the front axle of the trailing bogie.
This turned into one of those jobs that snowballed, when wires had to be soldered back into place - and were also pulled out of the connecting plugs - which was all necessary after cleaving the Kato shorty chassis in half to power this unusual contraption.
I've found that it's never performed as well as I might have hoped.
The gearing is so high that it is very flighty, and I've often wondered it it would benefit from having a resistor grafted on to calm it down a bit?
Contact with the rails isn't helped by one of the powered bogie axles being fitted with a traction tyre, which is quite unnecessary for something which is so light and doesn't have to haul anything.
The Parry People Mover is also very speedy, but is rather more reliable as it uses the four wheel tram chassis, but the lack of controllability of these Kato chassis does make me wonder how it is they became so popular for shoving under any number of 3D printed loco bodies?
The answer, I suppose, is simply because they're cheap.
I have a feeling that when I butchered one of those chassis for a project I messed with the wheels slightly. It's a while ago now, and not sure where the box with the half finished model in it is to check but....
ReplyDeleteI think each wheel is essentially on half a metal axle and they slot into the plastic axle which is essentially a tube. That means you can pull off the driven wheel with the traction tyre and replace it with one of the wheels from the unpowered bogie.