Reaching back to a time to when I used to post a lot of small workbench projects on this page, here is a simple totally non-useful project from last week.
Firstly it was surprising that people were caught out by the TT Jinty from a few days ago thinking it was OO, so here for real is a 4mm one inspired by watching OO Bill videos (which get slightly addictive) and to see if I could polish one up.
There are more than a few on ebay of varying conditions. This looked OK and was 20 quid. It ran, which was puzzling as the wire to the pick ups was broken – see the brown wire below. I took everything apart aside from the wheels and soaked everything in switch cleaner to get rid of the grease.
The commutator was polished with T-cut and every electrical connection was cleaned with this and/or emery paper. The wire re-soldered and the mech put back together. The result is interesting: It obviously doesn’t like Code 75 track, but runs OK on plain Bullhead. What is does like is Code 100 to the point where on testing on Svanda’s ballasted track it ran way beyond expectation, down to a crawl and easily equalling any modern loco. This is a 60 year old mech. Really?
What did I get out of this? At a basic level, a couple of hours of fun tinkering, which is a very CF thing. It does throw up all sorts of questions. As Phil pointed out a while back, this sort of stuff is cheap as chips. Is it worth further serious exploration?
