PatB

It wasn't necessarily reworked from the form you bought it in. There are companies which specialise in "mining" PSUs from the mountains of scrap electrical goods which now exist, packaging them up as stand-alone units, and flogging them as new.

I dunno though. CI wheel blanks aren't cheap these days. Whether it's worth the price is going to depend on whether what's there is appropriate for the loco you want to build. I can see it being quite reasonable value if you want to build, say, a 4-4-0 tender loco, and then flog off all the surplus castings, ideally in smaller, matching lots. Edit: I've just had a look at AJ Reeves' website. Whilst I don't know what gauge the wheels on Ebay are for, if they're for 31/2" gauge (not an unreasonable assumption, given the plethora of 31/2" gauge bits in the world) those driving wheels are easily £35-40 a pop to buy new. I'm having difficulty getting the site to give me results for smaller gauges, but even if G1 (say) bits were half the price, £85 the lot is still not outlandish. I can see more and more lots like this coming up in the medium term, as a generation of Myford owners hop the Twig and their estates attempt to monetise a shedfuls of mysterious bits and pieces.

I'm not convinced it's all from the same source as there are some inconsistencies. Some of the vehicles have tension lock couplings, whereas others have DGs(?), suggesting that they weren't all intended to run together. Whilst not actually an inconsistency, as such, the JCB on the Lowmac appears to be the old Airfix model, albeit nicely finished and so is probably a bit early to plausibly be still around in the Dutch livery era. I agree, though. It's surprisingly nice by the seller's typical standards. I still wouldn't pay the thick end of a grand for it, mind. Still, if you wanted all the bits, what would it cost to replicate? Especially if you lacked the skills to detail/paint/modify to the same standard?

I dunno. Maybe if they had a proper vice they wouldn't have time to be a serial squasher of toy cars.

I'll be rewinding the field on the cooked motor as soon as the wheel puller I've ordered turns up so I can get the mech apart safely. I could probably get the wheels off by levering, but I don't need to so I've decided not to risk it. I could probably rewind it in situ, but it would be very awkward, involving feeding metres of wire through a narrow, sharp edged slot, guaranteed to scrape off the enamel in places. Looking at it, there's bags of space to increase the windings proportionate to those on the armature. Of course, the question arises that, if it's likely to be beneficial, why didn't Marx do it? I'm going to choose to believe that it was down to cost control. When you're building many thousands of motors, a couple of feet extra wire in each will add up to something substantial enough to be noticed by the bean counters. And if your locos have enough oomph to pull the 3 or 4 cars in the average set at 160 mph, why make them capable of more? I'm not too worried about the theoretical possibility of the motor overspeeding. I suspect there's enough friction in the mech that there will always be at least some load on the motor. Besides, even if it did run away to the point of bursting the armature windings or making the bearings glow, I can't see the consequences as being too dire. It's too small to explode dangerously, and it won't be unattended so it's unlikely to burn the house down. That's absolutely fascinating. Many thanks. I've only skimmed the material so far, but will give it my full attention once I've done all the stuff that was less attractive than hand rewinding an armature yesterday . It will be very interesting to compare the differing approaches used on either side of the Atlantic.

Conceivably any of those. Or maybe just the vagaries of ancient, cheaply constructed toys. Bit of an update. I did a fairly quick and dirty armature rewind this afternoon. Standard is 60 turns of ~0.3 mm wire per pole. Without trying very hard I got 70 turns on and, with more attention to layering them neatly, I reckon I could get 80 turns on fairly comfortably. As a test of my workmanship I stuck it in an uncooked motor and it's now trundling up and down my auto-shuttle track quite happily. It seems slower at a given controller setting than an unmodified mech. I'm not sure about torque output. I haven't the room at the moment to really load it up and test rewound against standard. TBH, I'm just ridiculously chuffed that it works. I can now play around knowing that, if I'm daft enough to cook another one, a couple of bucks worth of wire and an hour or two will see it as good as new again.

I'm reminded of the climax of the excellent, and very funny, animated film The Triplets of Belville . Hopefully it's not too much of a spoiler to mention that it's an extended chase scene that includes, possibly, every 2CV visual gag ever devised.

That'd be my guess, but the builder seems to have sprung for nice wheels, for example, so bunging a motor in "just in case" wouldn't have been that big a step.

I'm curious as to why someone went to a fair bit of time and trouble to do a reasonably nice build, and then didn't put a motor in it.

Way back (long before the existence of Xuron cutters or the universal possession of mini-drills, Dremels etc), Dad and I always used a junior hacksaw, whilst holding the rail steady with pliers. Didn't take long, and seemed to work. Whilst our layouts weren't, by current standards, very good, none of our problems stemmed from dodgy track joints. These days I'd refine the holding method by cutting a pair of suitably spaced grooves in an offcut of pine to slip over the rails, as I have for 00.

No worse than a (perfectly legal) motorcycle exhaust downpipe. Thin steel headers cool down pretty quickly after switching off anyway, so the period of hazard isn't very long.

it's got to be worth the asking price, just for the track components, although dismantling would be a shame.

I've noticed one odd thing. One of my DC'd locos has what Marx aficionados call the "small" or "one-way" motor. This is an el-cheapo variant that was used, primarily, in later bottom of the range units. It's got a shorter pickup shoe, paxolin rather than steel side plates, a consequently slightly different electrical return path, and no separate brush plate, making it much harder to dismantle. The armature and field look to be the same as the full size motor, though as the armature won't come out for inspection without separating the side plates it's hard to be sure. Anyhow, this motor variant, on smoothed DC, was staggeringly fast and smooth. Running light, it would become airborne on 027 curves on 9V, whereas the traditional large motor locos needed another 3-6V to achieve the same feat. However, on unsmoothed DC it is a decidedly reluctant runner. Although it seems to start reliably it's slow, noisy and generally unhappy. It intrigues me that there can be so much variation in motors which, on the surface at least, are electrically similar.

Just smooth and lumpy DC. Although I've got a couple of AC power supplies (the one I've just tried and another that might be a tad marginal, current wise), I haven't, until getting the Marx deathtrap a couple of weeks ago as part of a set, had a means of speed control. Consequently, I've been running things on DC, either simple testing with unmodified locos using their electromechanical reversers, or actual operation with a bridge rectifier feeding the field to allow simple DC reversing. Now that I've got a Marx transformer, and a suitable 220-110V step down unit, I'll see about getting around to trying a couple of unmodified locos as Louis intended and seeing how they go. One of the locos is a (relatively, in a Marx context) uncommon tin diesel which is a bit too nice for even a philistine like me to attack with wire cutters and soldering iron.

There was a fatal crash on a crossing here in Perth at the weekend. It got a brief mention and a few seconds of footage on the evening news, but I can't seem to find an online news article. It was on the local commuter network as far as I could see, where all the crossings have barriers and wig-wags, so it's fairly safe to assume that the driver either wove around the barriers, or was sitting on the crossing in a traffic queue.

Based on my extensive time spent in breakers yards back in the early 80s, conventional cars used to catch fire quite frequently back then, but I don't remember anyone worrying about it overmuch out in the world in general. An awful lot of yard inmates were there because of either an engine (carburettor, basically) or dashboard (electrical) fire. Indeed, of the stuff that was too young to be there because of rust, I'd estimate that fire damage was at least as common as crash damage as a cause of writing off. As for not being able to put out a battery fire, I would point to Exhibit A, the air-cooled VW magnesium crankcase and gearbox housings. Known for 60 years to burn fiercely and pretty much unextinguishably in the event of an engine fire getting out of hand, but not, AFAIK, worried about overmuch in the world at large, even when there were an awful lot of them around.

Thanks Andy. That was what I was starting to suspect. However, I've just spent a few minutes digging out my biggest AC power supply (5A at 17V max output), and connecting it up via a somewhat beefed up (and modified to use locally available components) Roger Amos controller, with full wave rectification but no smoothing capacitor. The result is that an uncooked standard Marx loco appears to be starting 100% consistently. It's running a bit more noisily than when fed smooth DC, but the wiggly waveform seems to be doing the trick as far as overcoming "sticktion" is concerned. Well, well; who'd have thunk it? Bottom line is that it looks as if I'll be rewinding the dead motor as standard, or at least with standard wire thicknesses (~0.3 mm on the armature, ~0.6 mm on the field). There might be space to get a few more turns in, but I'm now confident that a standard motor, suitably fed, will do the job, so it's not a disaster if things don't fit. Now I just need to package up the controller circuit a bit more neatly than its current breadboard arrangement.

Given how often Prince Harry seemed to be visiting Australia a while ago, I'd have put money on us once again being a convenient hiding place for embarrassing members of the British aristocracy. I was quite surprised when it didn't happen.

Back when I was working away from home in Canberra, and didn't have much else to do, I took considerable pleasure in getting to the point where I, a fat old git in a raggy t-shirt and flapping cargo shorts, could comfortably pedal my stupidly high geared singlespeed that looked like it came out of a skip (much of it did), past a goodly percentage of the lycra crowd. It was even more fun when I managed to do it uphill, seated, whilst the target was flailing away out of the saddle like a TdF rider going up an alp. Admittedly such antics sometimes left me looking for an out of sight spot to bring up my breakfast afterwards but it was still very satisfying. Makes me think I need to resurrect Frankenfixie and do the same to some of the fancy-dress mtb-ers on the tracks I currently ride to work on. Trouble is, I'm now several years older and have more interesting things to do with my time these days.

That would probably be it, but I've tended to assume it to also be part of the reason why solenoids seem to snap over more vigorously on AC. However, beyond a fairly basic level, AC electrickery always made my eyes cross when I encountered it during my engineering studies and so, along with the more esoteric thermo stuff, the details always went out of my head pretty much instantly on completion of any necessary exam.

Dunno about big cat droppings deterring cats, but when an old-fashioned circus, with lions, tigers and whatnot, spent a while on the common where MrsB grew up, it was months before any of the local dogs could be willingly walked there again .

I would suggest that if an autonomous vehicle can (a) keep within lane markings, (b) maintain a steady speed when it's appropriate to do so, (c) maintain a safe distance between itself and other road users, (d) maintain its awareness of other road users and objects its vicinity and use the information to not collide with them, it is already streets ahead of 95% of West Australian drivers.

Which might explain why a labrador in front of a fire has heatsinking properties that exceed those of any other substance known to man. More seriously, I've recently seen it noted that Global Weirding is probably a better term than Global Warming, if only because it makes it harder for certain factions to claim that eg the recent Texas cold snap as proof that there's nothing seriously wrong.

Ooh. Radyot Blue Spot fog lamp. Classy.

My recollection of the non-tourist aspects of North Wales was that it was quite an impoverished area, with quite a sizeable cohort of the population unable to afford a car. Mind you, they might not be able to afford typical UK train fares either.