Wednesday 15th November

Worklist:
Generator room details
Fiddleyard cassettes

There was no meeting last week, but we all met at 'Showtrain' - the Tolworth Model Railway Show. The first highlight was meeting up with Dave Phillips, an old friend from T&DMRC days. Dave also helped out on Cottesmore and is pictured on the CLR page. You can't miss him - his nickname is 'Furry D'!

The second highlight was peering over a back-scene at a fiddleyard that employed cassettes exactly like ours. Instead of the multi-angle location system we had decided on, they simply had a folded piece of brass (see below). This provided location and electrical connectivity - Simples!

In the workshop, Stephen and Laurence were right in the middle of making some more cassettes, this so revelation couldn't have come at a better time. A brief group discussion to assess the idea, strip-off the angles from one cassette and then a bit of playing around with a bulldog clip proved it was a great solution. However, taking the angles off the cassette was all that was needed, as the angles on the fiddle end offered a perfect locator, so we only needed something on the open side. We decided on a strip of shaped metal bolted on the the end angles. A strip of nickel silver was cropped, bent into shape and fitted. It worked beautifully.

That sorted, Geoff went back to making racking for the batteries in the generator room and Stephen & Laurence started to make two more cassettes.

At the start of the session, Stephen had presented a solution to a problem with his new BO-BO diesel. The Bachmann GE44 has a recognised problem with 1st & 2nd generation chassis - the gears on the axles can crack, which causes a problem with the drive. Stephen's model has a 2nd gen chassis and the cracking is just beginning. However, a severe problem with another 1st gen chassis has made it unusable. Geoff & Stephen had discussed repair options, but Stephen had finally decided to try and make new ones. He read-up on gear specifications, their constituent dimensions, went through copious YouTube tutorials on drawing involute gears and finally sent a 3D drawing off to Shapeways in Holland. (The gears are 6mm dia. so four had to be joined to make the minimum print size). The new gears had arrived last week and were tentatively fitted to the old loco - they worked perfectly!

The final drawing above and the new gears below, still on their sprue beside the cracked gear.