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The good, the bad, and the ugly.Well, it's been a long time, but TBC has finally reopened for operations after nearly 4 years or operational inactivity. We have an annual modellers meet every year in BC (except during COVID) and as part of it, we have nearly 10 Vancouver-area layouts open for operating sessions. I hosted two this past weekend with 4 guest crew members each day and it was great to see things come back to life. Here are a few takeaways from the sessions. [These notes are mostly just rambling for my future self. Read on as you wish.]The good. The layout ran well, with a few minor exceptions noted below, and no cars or locos were harmed in the process. I've added a few mirrors in the back of the Vortex so crew members can follow their trains more easily when they are traversing the one-turn helix between the lower and upper deck, and that seemed to work well. I've also improved the virtual signal panels that are displayed on the fascia and people had no trouble reading the appropriate virtual signals for CPs where the physical signals were not yet installed.The bad. Each session had one mystery short that tied up the session for 10 minutes or so. The first was tracked down to an ExactRail gon that had an axle that was intermittently rubbing against a screw head on the coupler box and a wheel flange that was intermittently rubbing against the underframe in curves when the weight of the train behind it was applied. What a PITA is was to track that down. The second was when a sound-equipped SD70ACe ran a trailing point turnout that was lined against it. (Curiously, the short did not clear by backing the train - by hand - off the turnout. It was not until I physically pulled the loco off the tracks that the short cleared.) The other issue I need to come to terms with is managing the serial staging in the Mojave helix. Southbound trains pile up there and need to be flushed into the storage yard below and it is all to easy to let that slide and to have collisions when people are not paying close enough attention. In one case, a train was parked a foot behind the train ahead of it, but the throttle was unwittingly left at speed step 1 so the train creeped for a foot before rear-ending the train in front of it, sending some cars over the edge. Fortunately there was no damage.The ugly. Before the sessions, I made a pretty big push to convert some more cars to FVM wheels with one resistor-equipped axle per car. As I started dipping into my newly acquired Scale Trains branded FVM wheels with .540" axles, I soon realized that these do not roll in the 100-ton BLMA/Atlas trucks! (Nor in my MTL 1035 trucks.) WTF? The axle length does indeed check in at .540" on the nose with my callipers, but the BLMA wheels are more like .537-.538" and that seems to make the difference between rolling and not rolling. Boy was I pissed to discover that. I'd be curious to know if anyone else has experienced this.
While the FVM were marketed as .540, I seem to remember most measuring in the .538 range. Maybe that clearance was lost in the conversion and new tooling set up.
I'm going to try and track down a good reamer to see if I can make these new ones work. (There was a good one from the UK IIRC.)
I bought it and was disappointed.
Sorry to hear that, but thanks for saving me the time & money. Do you have a link to the Grainger countersink you're thinking of?
Actually it wasn't from Grainger (they don't have good selection of those). I got it from MSC.https://www.mscdirect.com/product/details/01050087I bought 2 of them and the plan is to shorten them so I can make a double-ended countersink that fits N scale truck sideframe. With 1/8" diameter shank, that will be a bit awkward,but I think it will work out. I will join them by either gluing or soldering them together using a piece of brass tubing as a splice.Since both cut in the same direction, the reamer will have to be twirled back and forth.
@peteski Peter, did you get the one flute countersink or the 6 flute countersink? From the photos it looks as if the one-flute version has a sharper tip, although I can't be sure from the photos if the "sharp" tip is just an artifact of the photo angle or actually goes down to a perfect center.Upon thinking about it, the counter-clockwise end wouldn't need to be an active countersink, but would be purposed just to hold the cutting side perpendicular to the truck sideframe, making cutting flutes superfluous. A small 60deg cone with its nose rounded off would probably be "safer" and perform the exact same function, or, you could round off the counter-clockwise countersink's tip so it wouldn't mess up the tip of the inverted bearing cone it will be sitting in.
It is a single-flute countersink. I prefer those for this type of task (and for most of my countersinking tasks as they basically self-center.)I still want to have double ended countersink for reaming the truck cups. When I spin it clockwise, the right end will while the opposite one keeps it centered. When I spin it counter clockwise, the left side will cut.
I bought it and was disappointed. The cutting edges are not very sharp. The slippery POM plastic trucks are made from really needs a sharp tool to cut it cleanly. Before finding that tool, I was planning on making one using 1/8" shank single-flute HSS countersinks from Granger. They are well made, and have sharp pcutting edge. Looks like I'll still have to do that.
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Topic: A week of wheels: FVM wheels in at Scaletrains (Read 10727 times)
