Building the Roxey 'Planet' - Part 3 - getting it running
Entry posted by Captain Kernow
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One thing I will say about the Roxey 'Planet' kit, is that is relatively easy to build, especially if you are happy to stick with the Tenshodo 'Spud' motor bogie option. Being whitemetal gives it the advantages of having some decent weight about it and also giving the builder the option to glue the main body components together, instead of soldering.
It is arguably a good 'starter kit' for someone wanting an industrial diesel and something with a bit of character. DJH do a 'starter kit' for an 02 0-4-0 diesel, which is pretty straightforward to put together and is also whitemetal, but might look, to some, as having a bit too much 'muscle' for a small industrial system or an impecunious light railway. There are plenty of other options available if you are happy to build an etched kit, and the ranges of Judith Edge Kits and High Level Kits offer much inspiration in that regard.
Anyway, back to the loco. Given that I wasn't using a 'Spud', I needed to build a basic 0-4-0 chassis to accommodate the High Level 'Quad Driver' gearbox and carry the weight of the loco body. A couple of bits of brass were cut to size, axle holes drilled out and some spare Comet frame spacers used:
In this photo, you can see that I've inked in the outline of the High Level gearbox, just to make sure everything fitted OK:
I put some wheels on the chassis and test fitted it to the loco body:
By this time I had just about worked out where the respective gear wheels went in the chassis and had also test fitted the motor to the gearbox:
At this point, and remembering a comment on one of the other threads on the building of this kit, I had to put one of the driving gear wheels on the rear driven axle. The axles are 2mm, and the driving gear wheels are a rather tight force fit, so lining every thing up, including axle washers to reduce slop and some 2mm internal diameter brass tubing to keep the gear wheels in their correct positions within the gearbox and drive extension, was going to be interesting. This is what it looked like with just the rear axle drive in place:
Having established that the motor would drive the rear axle and the adjacent gear wheels nice and smoothly, it was time for a further trial fit of the chassis to the body, this time with the motor attached, to enable the radiator front and top of the bonnet to be glued on, without fouling the Mashima 1020 motor inside:
Time now to glue the top of the bonnet on with 5 minute epoxy. My left hand acted as a clamp for around 10 minutes or so:
With the glue having set, I put the body aside for the glue to really harden and went back to the chassis.
I put the remaining driven gearwheel on the leading axle and wired the motor up to test run the whole assembly:
It ran pretty well, in fact, thanks to the excellent design and engineering of the High Level product.
A bit more work saw the Maygib industrial buffer shanks glued in place. The kit comes with a cast oval buffer, but I felt that some large, round industrial buffers were what I really needed:
Next was to get the loco running properly 'under its own power', ie. on some track with the pick ups fitted.
My first attempt at gluing some copper clad sleeper onto the chassis, to mount the pick-ups on, didn't work:
The copper clad sleeper stuck out too far from the sides of the chassis and prevented the body from sitting back on the chassis, so that came off and smaller bits were glued on the side of each frame, and pick ups soldered on:
The pick ups in the photo above were from 0.5mm phosphor bronze wire. This was another 're-learning' point. I had forgotten how relatively unyielding that diameter of wire is, when configured like that, so these were replaced with thinner p/b wire (0.4mm, I think), and that made a big difference.
The loco was then put on the test track for further testing:
I had built the chassis as uncompensated, as I reasoned that by building it square, so that all wheels were on the track at the same time, the pick ups should work OK off all four wheels. This proved to be rather idealistic, as in practice there are often tiny imperfections that inhibit current collection, so I had to dismantle the chassis more or less completely, and provide some basic compensation, which took the form of slight vertical ovals in the axle holds at one end, together with a bar for the centre of the axle to rest on. The other driven axle remained fixed. The compensated end is the left hand end in this photo:
After that, the loco ran much more smoothly, especially after I had applied a small amount of Carr's Microgrease to the gear wheels (not really necessary with Delrin gears, but there you go), and some lubrication to the axle holes. There were still some minor hesitations, though, so I then installed some additional wiper pick-ups, acting on the edges of the wheel flanges, plus I ran the whole chassis on a rolling road for a couple of hours. That bedded it all in nicely and I was now happy with the running.
One more installment to follow.
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