Wow 2016!

Here we are at 2016! I am all finished with my re-tie job on my Atlas WYE code 83 switch. I changed all the ties to match Micro Engineering ON30 track. I also added a caboose industries ground throw to it. ( I really like PC board ties ) Maybe this is the year that I will complete my ON30 shelf type layout. I have also just re-designed my corner module that I designed for our HO modular group. I reduced the maximum overall width of 72" to an easier and more manageable 53" while still getting a respectable 30" radius curve.

I got a new airbrush for Christmas, maybe I can complete some Mogul re-paint projects too.
More later....Vance

P.S. Stuckness: I earlier wrote about removing the Bachmann axle bolts. It seems that the greatest challenge for all kit bashers is stuckness. It appears that the current RTR models are designed and built by people who have no idea that anyone would ever want to take them apart. Good ole super glued, over torqued, sealed units!

Although I can usually over come their customer proof engineering with heat, cold, flexing, cutting, oven cleaner, alcohol, acetone, or MEK...  I say to all manufactures of nearly everything...STOP IT!

I bought it, I will disassemble it and modify it ... like it or not.

Now I need a break from re-building my ON30 projects and want to put together my over-planned layout...a slight bird walk here...I have a few thoughts about how I re-tie HO switches into ON30...

I was looking for an ON30 Wye switch for some time. I bought one from Cream City, but it didn't match my Micro engineering code 83 flex track (ties too thin and too wide), so I bought an Atlas code 83 Custom Line Wye switch to dissect. Ouch!

I soldered brass bars across the ends of my Atlas Wye switch and a few on the tops in the BK skeleton switch fashion. ( This keeps everything in gauge during dissection and rebuilding).

I then used a heat gun and stripped all the plastic ties.

I find that cutting the copper with a Dremel to insulate the circuit too be a bit sloppy, so I mask the PC ties where I want to keep the copper with a paint marker and etch the areas away where I want to have insulation with ferric chloride. After etching, I clean off the paint with acetone and then polish the remaining copper with a Scotchbrite pad. I then added Plastruct 90746 1/8 x .40 plastic strips to the bottom of my .062 PC board ties (super glued) and that makes them exactly the height and width of the Micro Engineering ties.

 I made a jig for the tie spacing I wanted and dropped in my custom table saw cut PC board ties. (Yes,  I used a 10" table saw to cut them) I soldered them in place with 63-37 solder and a bit of rosin flux.

 I am not sure if I like Pliobond glue and the wood ties...they come loose easily... Maybe I'll do all PC board ties... Vance

ON3O 2-6-0 Wheel bolt removal tool

Humm.. maybe you have been wondering how I get those little bolts loose that hold the rods to the wheels?

I went to the hardware store and bought a 2.5mm allen setscrew and super glued it into a piece of brass tubing...I cut my brass tubing to about 2-1/2"

Do a light grind on the end of the setscrew. (I do mean grind, as setscrews are hardened) . This is to remove most of the chamfer at the end of the setscrew, so you get a firm bite on the end of the wheel bolt...

That's the deal ......Vance

Why doesn't Bachmann include or sell this tool?

I remember years ago, that Mantua always included tiny wheel bolt wrenches with all their kits.

Back to On3O 2-6-0 Painting Chassis and Wheels

Back to On30!

I usually start with a Bachmann 2-6-0 Hawthorne Village engine, as I can get them cheap on ebay (if I am careful). So hence I will need to do some painting... See Ebay item number 221150634583 for a Hawrthorne Village engine to mod and bash...

P.S. If you buy a Hawthorne Village loco to bash / repaint, choose one that has the bottom plastic cover plate molded in black. This is very slippery plastic and it is best to buy it in the color you want, as  it is unlikely you will ever to get paint to stick to it. Sandblasting the plastic almost... sorta... kinda... works.

But is best to skip the whole problem...

Below is my painting jig for the wheels. The cutout in the middle is to clear the drive gear...I clean the wheel assembly with ammonia and water 50-50 before I start masking and painting. Then I add a little masking tape on the fixture and around the wheel rim, a piece of #12 house wire insulation over the crank pins, and I'm set to paint.....

Looking for a good paint to shoot the wheels and chassis can be somewhat interesting. I have discovered that most flat and semi-flat acrylic paints tend to absorb the grease or oil that the chassis and side rods require. In my experience, when I use acrylic paints, there is a shiny seep of grease or oil in to the adjoining areas of the flat acrylic paints. (Looks awful)  So I have set my thoughts towards using rattle can enamel paint.

It would seem easy enough just stop at Home Depot or Lowes and pick up some nice hard Rust-oleum paint. After spending more than 45+ minutes looking through ridiculous designer colors that I would never buy for anything, I discovered that they have flat black and satin black.... Where is the semi-flat black? Oh here it is on line from Lowes... humm..., it's not in my store, but it can be ordered in quantity? What! 

If I drive to Granger in Spokane and take a 7 hour+ round trip, I can buy it for about $7.00 without paying $12.00 for shipping...

Rust-Oleum 12 Oz. Semi Flat Black Flat

Spray Paint

Item #: 89137 |  Model #: 1678830           ( Lowes P/N )

Sorry about that...but I get it... The industrial product lines are not shipped to rural America. Check it out,  if most, if not all of the semi- flat black paints only occur in the "Industrial Line". I know Krylon is that way too. I think it is all tied to the 6 pack that aerosol paint is being sold in. Rural America can't move 6 of the "speciality paints" in a year, so they don't buy any in that line. If the corporate enties would sell paint in 3 packs, rural America would likely stock it, as they could likely turn it in a year. 

As close as I can come at the moment is Rust-oleum Trim and Bumper paint 251574 Matte Black.  It's a little shiner than I would like....But it's good hard paint... Talking to the Rust-Oleum Corp customer service folks, the flatness goes like this....Flat black, Semi-Flat  black, Matte Black, Satin Black, Semi-Gloss Black and Gloss Black....

But I still haven't completely given up on the Rust-Oleum Semi-Flat Black.....more later

Vance

On30 thoughts

For the remainder of the week I will be devoting my time to finishing some HO ultra light weight 2'x4' modules. We have started a module club and I need to get caught up on the modules I promised to deliver.

This winter I hope to finish my 2x6' On30 modular layout. (Consisting of 3ea 2'x6' modules to start) Same design as the HO 2x6' modules I have been building, but these will have a 2" foam top and weignt less than 25lbs with the built in fold up legs.

I don't know why I didn't build my layouts on modules years ago?...

hummmm...I guess it's because I didn't have a planer, a chopsaw, a radial arm saw, a 10" table saw, a 14" band saw, and a floor stand 12" drill press and the like.

If you want to have a wonderful excuse to buy some great tools, build a house! I did...
I guess that without these tools, a 4x8' piece of 3/4" ply can be so appealing...

Maybe later we can talk about the tools one needs to do these On30 mods...

I'm looking forward to getting back to the Bachmann On30 2-6-0 mods soon...Vance



P.S. If any of you don't follow the Yahoo On30 group, there has been quite a discussion about Bachmann and their cracked gears and other quality control issues...

I myself have posted a few thoughts in agreement... but I will say it here...That us model railroaders generally have the patience and skills to fix mostly anything that the model railroad manufacturers can throw at us...so bring it on! ....not really...I have enough to fix for the moment... 

The cool thing is with the internet, we can rapidly disseminate the things we learn worldwide ...so we don't have to spend so much time re-inventing the wheel, or the sand dome, or the upgraded gearing...

Vance

Bachmann On30 2-6-0 Mogul C&S #22

Before we get too much further down the road with re-detailing and modifying, I suppose that I should give you a link to the Denver Public Library. It shows most of what you need for this project. Bachmann did a pretty good job creating C&S #22 and then went on painting it for nearly every railroad you can imagine...

Take a look at C&S #22

http://cdm16079.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p15330coll22/id/42202/rec/29

You can really enlarge these photos and see lots of details.You can also look at simular C&S 2-6-0s and get some more ideas...

more later...

P.S. #21 is the closest and #9 (which still exists) is close but has a tapered boiler

Here is a short video of #9 www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3OkwflQ3SM

And here are a couple pictures of C&S #9 a close cousin of #22...

After about 2 years... I am going to continue with my On30 Bachmann mogul saga... I hope to start with a brake cylinder mounting modification. It should look like the photo to the left.

Note that the outside edge of the cylinder sets slightly inside of the outer edge of the wheel, and the back of the cylinder sits flush against the chassis.

Looking at the model, it seems that we have some work to do...

So here below is the North Pole version of the Bachmann On30 Mogul. Because it's brightly colored, it's fairly easy to see what it is missing... Yeah...a lot....

I think the protruding tab on the bottom of the cab support can be removed, and even the water line can be replaced with a brass rod and reshaped more like the prototype.    

However...this is only a model. If it were exactly right, it would be mostly all steel and run on steam. But I think that we can get closer to the real deal... without too much trouble or money...

Look at how far the brake cylinders are from the chassis!  We are going to fix this!

Just in case you are wondering, I am going to wait to put things into a black color until after I am done modifying and photographing... so you can see what I am doing. The bright colors make the details stand out well.

Obviously, on the real C&S #22, the brake cylinders were not hanging out on the end of posts, but are firmly attached to the chassis.  So as this is a 30" guage loco rather than a 36" gauge loco as in the prototype, we need to do some creative engineering.

So if C&S modified a simular loco to 30" guage, how would they do it?   I would assume that they would have a new chassis built, re-guage the wheels, then adjust the running gear?

So if the difference between 30" gauge and 36" gauge is 6" that would be 3" of frame width per side or 1/16" in 1/48 scale per side. So engineers being what they are in both the real world and the scale world and a few things get forgotton in design (like on this model)...  maybe the brake cylinders need something like a 1/16" or .062" of  shim behind them. 

We just want the outside of the cylinder brake lever top to be closer to the outside of the rear wheel as in the top picture of #22.

I'll see what plastic I have and give it a shot.

I found my plastic--1/8" evergreen plastic tube.  I shortened the brake cylinder posts so that the cylinder fits as close as our spacer allows... without bottoming out in its mounting hole.  Now for pictures instead of a thousand words....note the notch in the side of the 1/8" tube section that allows it to fit around the rim of the cylinder...

Once this section of tube is super-glued to the cylinder, it can be painted and glued into the chassis. I am thinking about either notching the coverplate where the lower pin enters into it or cutting off the lower pin entirely... That way the cover plate is easily removable...( I like easily removable )

With the larger mounting area, the cylinder will be much more stable...

Just a note: I have noticed that when I add  the firebox sides that the top part of the spacer ring runs a foul of the fire box sides sitting completely level. So either the firebox side needs a small notch needs to be removed to clear the 1/8" spacer ring or the top of the spacer ring needs to be trimmed even with the cylinder mounting pin to clear the firebox side...

I still like this way much than better than the Bachmann way...

Hmmm... Made in China, rebuilt in the USA.

I'll finish up the other side and be back later. Cheers.

P.S. There is also a single pin brake cylinder version which is glued into the lower plate wheel retainer only. I don't have a lot of confidence in that arrangement and will endevor to make an overall better system for both variants as time permitts....

Other thoughts... Don't think that all On30 Bachmann 2-6-0 moguls are the same... There are differences in the chassis, brake cylinders, circuit boards and so forth as per the production run...but they are all pretty close....The Hawthorne Village variety seems to be exactly the same as the hobby store runs or train set runs just with different paint. (remove the paint with a 10+ hr soaking in 91% isopropyl alcohol )  Your mileage may vary...

I do think that the newer production runs are slightly better... more later...