Saturday, January 03, 2009

Chassis with wheels


chassis with wheels
Originally uploaded by Phil_Parker.
The benefit of using the jig is that I ended up with a chassis that puts all 6 wheels on the ground. 0-6-0 chassis can be problematic if they aren't compensated with the centre axle ending up fractionally lower than the others leading to a see-saw effect. This reduces pickup to a maximum of 4 wheels at a time - you can tell if this is happening by looking at the dirt picked up from the track, if the centre set are muckier than the others then that's the problem.

Pushing the chassis around the wheels rotated without binding. That's not a big surprise as the holes in the rods needed no opening out. I'd have preferred them to be slightly smaller but as things work I won't mess around with them.

The rear supports for the slide bars are in. Each side is made up of 3 laminations and attaches to the side of the frames. The fixing point is tiny so I built up a shoulder of solder to give the joint added strength. After I finished I realised that it would be possible by cutting back the centre layer the sides could be joined with a bit of scrap etch. It's too late to do this now but the result would be a whole lot stronger.

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