The first step is to add the cranks to one side of the motor unit using the coupling rod and brass bushes to correctly align them with the small nuts used to hold the crank and bushes in place for testing. I managed this without any problems and even managed to glue the cranks in place without gluing anything solid that shouldn't have been. Before trimming the front screw and permanently affixing the bush to the crank I thought it wise to check for smooth running with the frames in place, as there is very little clearance between the frames and the cranks.
Unfortunately this is where things started to go wrong. I set everything up on a DCCconcepts rolling road (I bought this when I first got back into railway modelling last year to help service the OO gauge models that had been stored for so long), so I could carefully watch the movement. I gently applied some power and nothing moved. It turned out that I hadn't got the frame perfectly positioned when I built the chassis and while there was enough room for the front crank to rotate the back one was stuck. I did try gently sanding the back of the crank down a little (not easy given it was glued to the wheel), but in the end the only course of action was to disassemble the chassis to realign the frames correctly.
Fortunately having used super glue instead of solder to assemble the chassis it was fairly easy to break the parts down again. Cleaning the old glue off though would have been a nightmare, but fortunately lunchtime yesterday saw the post arrive, which included a package from Eileen's Emporium. The order had been placed for something else entirely (which I'll come back to in a later post), but on a whim I'd added a fibreglass pen to the order, and this made cleaning up the parts really easy.
I have done a little more work since cleaning up the frames (cranks attached to both sides now), but I'll wait to show you the motion in action until I've got the frames back together and everything working. Hopefully that might be later today but it depends how things go.
Soldered joints can come apart easily as well, which is part of the reason that I like etched kits! However, its still pretty painfull having to strip down an assembly, but all part of the learning process.
ReplyDeleteIts nice to see someone glueing this kit together, if only to prove that it can be done.
There is no way I could be accurate enough with a soldering iron to do the motion parts at least, although I suppose I might have been able to solder up the frame.
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