The coal cars, as displayed at the Railway Modellers’ Meet, were curiously difficult to get onto the rails. Well, there was no time to fuss, and so, into the box they went for inspection by the 100 or so modellers who came up to SFU. Once home, and after some final details had been applied, I turned one of the cars over to see what the matter was.
Well, it didn’t take long to discover that the rear truck was fouling against the hand brake rocking lever. Delving back into OnShape with the right objects visible revealed why: I had designed the rocking lever to pass right through the wheel!
I hemmed and hawed for a bit, and then just nipped off all those rocking levers and moved them to something closer to vertical. They didn’t like this one bit, but I eventually got them to succumb. I could then get the cars onto the track, where they rolled backward happily, but two of them rolled forwards with squeaky complaint – as if they had the brakes on.
Diagnosing this behaviour took a couple of nights of thinking, but I eventually concluded that the rear truck was able to move beneath the car slightly, and when it did so, the wheel came into contact with the rocking lever again. I turned a little length of tube to reduce the amount of play in the truck, which improved matters, but I was still able to force the truck into an alignment where it could could just nick the lever.
In the name of derailment free operation, I was just about to remove the lever entirely, when I concluded that I could just remove the bit that was able to touch the wheel. It’s all in shadow anyway, so you’ll never notice unless you’ve read this blog post. And of course, they’ll probably fall off one day as they’re just held in place with CA, but at least they’ll be there for the wrap up photos.
Pembroke:87 