August 8
Still moving along with engine building, even with company visiting. I decided to take the simple approach to isolating the frames from the wheels: file down the outsides of the frame to reduce the frame thickness and apply black plastic electrical tape ( carefully trimmed to fit the frame
While I was finishing up testing the isolation, my CT SL75 decoders arrived. My, these things are TINY! I'm thinking I've figured out how I *might* put in wipers, but that's an open question.
For shimming the Flea motors, I decided to cut MicroMark 1/4 oz lead car weights in four pieces, strip off the foam adhesive and use double sided tape to apply. And now the engines are shimmed up with some of the crankpin lock nuts installed).
I've put working on crossheads and the cylinder block on hold because it looks like the crossheads won't clear the front crankpins without some modification. My choices are either to (1) file down the crankpins, (2) raise the cylinder block 3mm or (3) spread the cylinder block apart by a few mm. I'm buying an extra cylinder block to pursue option 3 for now, with #2 being the fallback. If anybody has other ideas, I'm listening.
As far as the wipers are concerned, I'm currently thinking of cutting 1/32" thick PC Board to the proper length, notching the top edge to isolate the sides and placing the board over the frame between the axles of the 0-4-0T to provide a central support and contact point for decoder wiring and phosphor bronze wipers that pickup from the top of the tires. For the 0-6-0T I'm thinking of two of these, one between each pair of axles. Again, if folks have other ideas, I'm certainly interested in hearing them.
The other thing I did was to sit down with the operating recommendations from Porter and check my previous operating assumptions. What I found was
- That operating at 10mph would lead to a 35% reduction in tractive force over operating at between 5 and 6 mph - so I'm rethinking the top operating speed.
- That my car cards and waybills are going to include some measure of load weight and the engine cards will include some measure of hauling capacity so that the practicable limits can be followed. Depending on the power of the engines (once completed) I may look at live loads or weighted car loads to increase car weight, but that's a later decision).