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Fen End Pit - Slater's Simplex - Chassis drive(s)


Fen End Pit

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Progress on the Simplex continues, the parts supplied with the kit fitted together superbly and getting the bearings and axles, motor, wheels, gears and delrin chain was very straight-forward.

 

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The supplied sprung pick-ups have been inserted into the frames with the wires just lose pending wiring to the DCC chip.

 

The quality of the molded parts is excellent and the instructions have the look of a Hayne's manual. When the parts list includes 'Spark plugs' and 'Magneto' you know you are onto a good thing! (must remember to make some empty 'Champion Spark Plug' boxes to have discarded in the shed!)

 

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Thanks to Nigel Lawton I now have a 12v micro-motor which can drive the fan, this required a little bit of material removing from the inside of the engine block casting. The kit includes a metal pulley wheel for the radiator belt but this comes as a single turning complete with axle. Rather than try and remove the axle and drill a hole for the motor shaft, which is what Roy Link did in his model in The Review 102, I opted to order an adapter shaft from Nigel to take the 1mm up to 1.5mm and then get a replacement brass pulley wheel.

 

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In order to support the fan drive motor I needed a little cradle which could go on the main drive motor. This means that the fan motor can be securely held to the chassis and just project through the main 'footplate' casting. The cradle was modeled up and printed out of the FDM printer. 5 minutes of drawing and 12 minutes of printing!

 

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I visited the St. Neot's show yesterday, very good once we actually got in but I was having a sense of humour bypass while waiting in the over-flow car park for 40 minutes waiting for a bus. The organisers had been let down by their transport company and were having to scrabble to find alternatives. Fortunately by the time we wanted to get back the lack of buses had been sorted. While at the show I spoke to Digitrains and purchased an MX648R sound decoder with a custom 'Simplex' sound installed. I've also got a bunch of 'stay-alive' capacitors and a Zimo speaker to install. The speaker should easily fit in the hollow bottom of the fuel tank!

 

Quite a lot of gubbins to install, but it looks like it should all go in. I wasn't so sure that I'd manage to get my usual Lenz Gold + Power-1 + Dietz SUSI sound chip in and finding that there was a custom Simplex sound project available was the clincher. I'm not too sure about connecting the fan motor to the DCC chip, my friends in the MERG seem to suggest I can just connect it directly to an accessory output and control the speed using 'dimming' functions on the chip but any other experience would be very useful to know about.

 

David

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