Changing Points ... With Style

Back in May I started looking into how I would operate the points on the OO9 gauge layout I'm intending to build. I made the decision to use a servo to throw each point and wrote two posts, one on the electronics and one on actually using the setup to throw an OO9 point. The one thing missing in both of those posts was an actual switch of any kind; I triggered the point throw by simply pulling one of the Arduino pins to ground with a short piece of wire which is clearly not a long term solution. The second of my railway related birthday presents (the first being the Heath Robinson book) has solved the problem in a very stylish fashion.

The solution to the problem is a Cobalt-S switch lever from DCCconcepts. Essentially this is a simple combination of a momentary switch and two SPDT switches, but it is packaged to look and work like an old fashioned point/signal lever. Of the nine wires I've currently just used two (one half of one SPDT) to trigger the electronics.

The angle of the video doesn't really show off the lever at its best although it does nicely show the lock mechanism. I've also yet to paint it or attach the rest of the detailing parts, but I think we can all agree that it's quite a stylish way to change the points. I'll need to pick up another one at some point as I'm planning two points on the layout but that is one more decision taken.

Quarry Hunslet: Working Brakes

Okay, so there is a slim chance that not all the problems I had with the frames yesterday were down to not putting them together straight to start with (although that was definitely a problem).

This morning I spent quite a while making sure they were nicely aligned both to the footplate and against the wheels before gluing them back together. Once the glue had set, I placed everything back on the rolling rode, and while I got some movement, it wasn't fluid and smooth, but the clearances appeared perfectly fine. On closer inspection I realised that the problem had nothing to do with the clearance between the frames and cranks, this time at least, but that the brake detail on the frames was pressing against one of the rollers which was causing the roller to stick which in turn was stopping the wheel from smoothly turning; in other words it was acting as a brake!

Moving the whole thing off the rolling road and onto the track and it moves nicely. Now I just have to put the coupling rods and bushes back on and hopefully that will be the first part of the motion assembled and working.

Quarry Hunslet: Is This Progress?

So yesterday, with no small amount of trepidation, I set about assembling the motion of the Quarry Hunslet kit I'm building from this scary looking selection of parts. It wasn't entirely a success, but I will say it wasn't exactly disastrous either.

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.