Dartmouth progress

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Paul Townsend
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Joined: Mon Sep 14, 2009 6:09 pm

Re: Dartmouth progress

Postby Paul Townsend » Sat Nov 28, 2020 5:58 pm

You are right, this is a first fix. That is why the assembly is Brook-Smith for easy soldering adjustment. When the TT BG rails are fixed, all approach rails will be tweaked for final positions.

stevemcclary
Posts: 13
Joined: Thu May 03, 2012 3:20 am

Re: Dartmouth progress

Postby stevemcclary » Sun Nov 29, 2020 11:41 am

Not all dual-gauge turntables have interlaced track to balance the load. The turntable at the Keswick Interstate terminal in Adelaide has a common rail for both standard and broad gauge. However, common rail changes over sides in the middle of the deck with a switchless joggle very similar to Paul's arrangement.

The turntable is still in use for standard gauge locomotives only; the broad gauge connection to the yard was lost when the standard gauge was extended to Melbourne some tears ago.

Steve

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Paul Townsend
Posts: 964
Joined: Mon Sep 14, 2009 6:09 pm

Dartmouth progress

Postby Paul Townsend » Thu Dec 10, 2020 3:35 pm

OMWB today
1. Finished cleaning up and reducing to length a set of Broad Gauge driving split axles, 32.9mm long, for my friend Tim Merry who is building an early 0-6-0 loco for me.
These have stainless steel tube with clockmakers pivot wire as core. They replace a failed experiment with using 2mm fibreglass as the core. The fibreglass seemed a good idea but which proved to be not strong enough.....bent and snapped when pressing wheels on.

I have made normal P4 ones before with the hard steel core and found it a very messy process due to the need to wind cotton onto the core's coat of araldite to ensure insulation. A wheeze that helped this time was to prepare the core the day before with a tiny smear of contact adhesive on the metal then wind on the cotton spiral. When it has cured it controls the cotton well when the araldite is added for assembly into the tubes...less cleaning up required

The Cowells lathe is running beatifully smoothly now with its new drive belt.

2. The turntable has been proven mechanically but the first program tried in Arduino that drives the stepper motor is too jerky for my taste. While I find a better program with finer micro-stepping I return to:

3. Now back to sticking chairs down to ply sleepers. Fortunately just received 2.5L of Butanone...should see me through this task!


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