Re: Paul's workbench
Posted: Sun Sep 10, 2017 11:59 am
Hi All
This is probably the least interesting thing to write about for many but.....a friend asked me to fit a DCC decoder into an old Hornby "Mallard" and against my better judgement I said yes .
The real problem with the old tender drives is a lack of pickups, only 2 contact points to each rail, so before any thought of fitting a decoder can be entertained I needed to improve the collection of the ergs.
As the photo shows I have fitted some vero board pads to the chassis top and made some very long/springy pickups that add only minimal resistance to the chassis, don't want to load up the drive any more than necessary. Next I made up a contact wiper on the draw bar to transmit power to the tender which has a brass pad mounted next to the existing pin. These extra pickups improved thing no end, loco now running quite reliably over dead frog points and less than shiny track.
The decoder then fitted to the tender and programmed to give a reasonable slow start speed and less than light speed top end Moving on to my next project, I think this NBR thing is getting out of hand...I've been after a J36 for quite a while and managed to find one in Wellington of all places. It was already built, quite some time ago I think, it was fitted with the old style Romford wheel (the ones without the N/S tyre on one side) and a fairly Michael Rodent drive line. The builder had also decided to fit brass bearings to the white metal chassis (why ?????, white metal pretty good as a bearing) making proper alignment of the axles interesting.
A few hours of disassembly and then rework and it has nice new Markits 5' (not the right ones but all I had) wheels and a Comet GB5 50:1 gearbox and Mahsima 1024 motor, performance is promising so far. Cheers
Paul
This is probably the least interesting thing to write about for many but.....a friend asked me to fit a DCC decoder into an old Hornby "Mallard" and against my better judgement I said yes .
The real problem with the old tender drives is a lack of pickups, only 2 contact points to each rail, so before any thought of fitting a decoder can be entertained I needed to improve the collection of the ergs.
As the photo shows I have fitted some vero board pads to the chassis top and made some very long/springy pickups that add only minimal resistance to the chassis, don't want to load up the drive any more than necessary. Next I made up a contact wiper on the draw bar to transmit power to the tender which has a brass pad mounted next to the existing pin. These extra pickups improved thing no end, loco now running quite reliably over dead frog points and less than shiny track.
The decoder then fitted to the tender and programmed to give a reasonable slow start speed and less than light speed top end Moving on to my next project, I think this NBR thing is getting out of hand...I've been after a J36 for quite a while and managed to find one in Wellington of all places. It was already built, quite some time ago I think, it was fitted with the old style Romford wheel (the ones without the N/S tyre on one side) and a fairly Michael Rodent drive line. The builder had also decided to fit brass bearings to the white metal chassis (why ?????, white metal pretty good as a bearing) making proper alignment of the axles interesting.
A few hours of disassembly and then rework and it has nice new Markits 5' (not the right ones but all I had) wheels and a Comet GB5 50:1 gearbox and Mahsima 1024 motor, performance is promising so far. Cheers
Paul