622 on her wheels

You might expect that at this point it would be a simple matter of dropping the drivers into the chassis, screwing the engine truck on and sending the whole assembly out for a test roll. Sadly, no. Somehow, the design for 622´s springs got changed, and a whole lot of extra metal got added. So, […]

Engine truck wheels

The engine truck, which I primed yesterday, went together more or less as planned this morning before I left for work. Unlike #10, which has tiny equalizing beams and floating bearings trapped in rigid sideframes, #622 allows the whole sideframes to rock. The bearings are simple holes in the sideframes, meaning the wheels are permanently […]

7AM Conference Call

Was I still in my pyjamas? No, but I may have been calling in from the modelling disk. Good thing the camera was off in any event. I blasted a little primer onto 622’s engine truck as it’s going to be hard to do once the truck is assembled. It’s not the hours. It’s the […]

Removing the long axles

With the drivers quartered, the long axles have now served their purpose. I started cutting the first one with a jeweller’s saw. An hour and two blades later, I decided to switch to a cut-off disk and the Dremel tool. I took it slow to avoid melting the spokes or (worse) the axle-wheel joint, and […]

Drivers quartered

There is a saying in the Maker community: if you can’t make it perfect, make it adjustable. The corollary is surely that if you can’t make it adjustable, make it perfect. These drivers are a one-shot deal. Either I get the quartering perfect, or I’m soaking them in acetone to loosen the epoxy, which will […]

Exhaust cam

I am going to steal #10’s ESU DCC decoder for #622; it’s not doing any good sitting in the tender while #10 awaits shopping. This decoder wants four magnets and a Hall sensor to synchronize the exhaust chuff sound. Now, there is not much space on the axle between the gear box and the wheel […]

Improved engine truck assembly

The first time I assembled the engine truck, it was held together mostly by fervent prayer while the epoxy set. The result was as shaky as my belief in prayer! Perhaps if I were more spiritual, this would be a good strategy for me. The second and third attempts leveraged a new pair of jigs […]

Crankpins installed

I decided to use the quartering jig to hold onto the crankpins while the epoxy holding them in place cured. The theory was that regardless of where the actual holes in the wheels wound up, the vital metric was the distance between wheel centre and the crankpin itself. So, I gave the quartering jig bosses […]

Another way to wreck a driver

You may recall that one of the previous methods to wreck a driver was to drill the hole for the crankpin off-centre. Actually, that didn’t completely wreck the driver: once the spokes had been taken out, it looked salvageable. A short length of steel soldered in the hole and filed flush made it look as […]

Crankpin nuts: a war of attrition

The crankpins leverage M0.6 bolts, with nuts buried in housings inside the back of the wheel. Those nuts are really tiny – 1 mm across the flats, and so, I had always thought I would glue them into the back of the crankpins, rather than risk having them work loose and disappear amongst the ballast. […]