A little reorganisation

[28ten]

I am proposing to merge Heads up and Resources as the distinction is a bit of a grey area, the best stuff can then be pulled out into Reference.
There will be a new section for Techniques which will cover topics such as soldering, DCC, painting etc as there has been some good advice in various threads but i think it would be good to centralise it.

I have also been looking at adding a gallery facility with better image handling capabilities, but so far I haven't found anything that is both simple and reliable.

 

[Pugsley]

Sounds good. Where would I put a request for help? I'm having trouble with my wheels and re-profiling them.

 

[28ten]

Sounds good. Where would I put a request for help? I'm having trouble with my wheels and re-profiling them.

In here (Talk) ? Im not that fussed about categorising everything :laugh: :laugh:

whats the problem with the wheels?

 

[Pugsley]

Concentricity, basically. I've started using a 4 jaw chuck, as I discovered a problem with runout on the 3 jaw. With the DTI positioned above, bearing on the outside of the wheel, I've got it centred to 0.02/0.03mm. If I move the DTI to bear on the tyre, on the back of the wheel, then I get a runout of 0.05-0.09 depending on which wheel, and the position of the axle (which I'm using to secure the wheel for facing). Is this normal for Slaters wheels?

I've also narrowed one of the wheels down a little too much, by accident, it's now 3.1mm, not 3.2 - is that going to make much difference? Can I recover it by reducing the opposite wheel to the same width, and making sure I use them as the centre axle in one bogie, or am I best off getting another axle's worth of wheels and using this one as a practice set?

I must admit, I'm finding this a little trickier than I thought I would - it all seems so easy according to the theory!

 

[Simon Dunkley]

Concentricity, basically. I've started using a 4 jaw chuck, as I discovered a problem with runout on the 3 jaw. With the DTI positioned above, bearing on the outside of the wheel, I've got it centred to 0.02/0.03mm. If I move the DTI to bear on the tyre, on the back of the wheel, then I get a runout of 0.05-0.09 depending on which wheel, and the position of the axle (which I'm using to secure the wheel for facing). Is this normal for Slaters wheels?

I've also narrowed one of the wheels down a little too much, by accident, it's now 3.1mm, not 3.2 - is that going to make much difference? Can I recover it by reducing the opposite wheel to the same width, and making sure I use them as the centre axle in one bogie, or am I best off getting another axle's worth of wheels and using this one as a practice set?

I must admit, I'm finding this a little trickier than I thought I would - it all seems so easy according to the theory!

As Slaters wheels are injection moulded plastic into steel tyres, there will be some eccentricity. More importantly, with the squared axle end, the only way to get things true is to turn each wheel up on the axle it will be mounted on, and to mark the wheel and axle so that they can always be put back together in exactly the same way. (I have limited exposure to Slaters wheels: the steam drivers do have squared axle ends, not sure about the diesels.) The ends of the round parts of the axles, which form the location for the back of the wheel, are not always square either: a lot of people touch these carefully with a sharp tool, maybe inserting a washer to space out for the "lost" metal.

But, to put things into perspective, 0.1mm is 4 thou, so 0.025mm is 1 thou, or roughly 1/23 of a scale inch (4 thou is about 1/6"), so is this a big deal for you? I am impressed that you have got the run out to be that small, given what you are doing. Within the limitations of the materials, and assuming you fit springing, this may be as good as you can get. I doubt that one wheel with 0.1mm missing from the width will affect things much, but I always order and extra wheelset when doing this kind of thing, just in case...

If you want it to be better, then you either need to match wheels to specific axle ends, use a more expensive supplier (CI wheels with tufnol or similar bushes) or turn your own from steel, again with tufnol bushes.

Hope that helps.

 

[bogusman]

Hi Pugsley
To put your 0.1mm difference on the width of your wheels into perspective just measure one of your hairs from your head this will on average be about 0.05 half the thickness of your discrepancy so I would not be concerned about these tolerances you have mentioned.

Regards
Pete

 

[Pugsley]

Thanks for the replies chaps - so effectively my problem is that I'm trying to be too precise!

Thanks for the examples as well - it puts what I've been trying to acheive into perspective, and I guess that nothing is going to be perfect when working with a relatively cheap Chinese mini-lathe!

 

[28ten]

I will post some shots of my method in a new thread when I have some time this evening, but I wouldn't really want to run narrow tyres.....

 

[Pugsley]

Thanks - I'd appreciate that. The other part that I haven't got my head round yet is how to mount the wheel for reducing the central boss width, so any pointers on that would also be gratefully recieved.

 

[28ten]

A little update
I have looked at some other forum software but apart from IPBoard I didnt see it as being a meaningful change or upgrade, the downside of IPboard is its cost. So i have taken the decision to develop the existing software and at the moment I am testing gallery mods for the site so each user can their own little section, this will allow multiple uploads and hopefully sort the image resizing problems at the same time. While I am testing this lot I will be tweaking a few other things and adding a header image. All this is being done on my test site so it wont disrupt anything here, but hopefully within the next month or so we should have some improvements to add to this site.