I had a reasonably productive afternoon. First, built a LED driver board using some new surface mount capacitors to see if the combined total of the 10 22uF caps would meet my needs... they dont, but now I know... will remove a few and replace with larger values. Then I replaced some LEDs in a Broadway E-unit (Mars and number boards) followed by lubricating and doing final tweaks on the 10 cars for my (CN&W) Twin Cities 400. For lubrication, I use a combination of light oil and powdered PTFE... great for the brass car trucks... kills the mice and makes em roll nice and smoothly. Following that, I tweaked up 8 additional cars for that train, and one brass caboose that needed a little height adjustment. By tweaking I mean setting the tension on the trucks so they have the right amount of pitch, roll and yaw flexibility along with ease of turning, clearing car bodies and under-carriage components and piping. If the couplers are at the prescribed heights, then to clear the skirts on the passenger car bodies the car body itself sometimes has to be raised off of the car under-frame. I do this simply by unscrewing the base plate from the body shell and inserting 0.015 shim washers and then screwing it back together. In a couple of severe cases, thicker washers were necessary, but the fifteen thousandths ones do the trick for most. Any modeler who buys brass cars should be prepared to work on them if he wants them to actually run well on a layout.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 03:17:18 +0000
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