Large Scale Central

Metal Wheels... a Newbie needs guidance

Modeling Rolling stock
#1

Howdy!

Looking over the various websites, and easpcially EBAY, beginners find out early that there’s a LOT of metal wheels being sold out there.

From what I’ve seen there are definite advantages to going with metal rather than plastic; if nothing else, the track crud argument hits home with me, especially after the first time I cleaned up wheels on used rolling stock!

Stock Bachmann metal wheels on some of the stuff are downright bizarre; a plastic wheel with a metal tire. It seems logical, but they’ve already lost my respect; I have a few of Bachmann wheel sets here that don’t run true. There’s VERY obvious wobble as they rotate! These winners turned up on the combine and observation cars that came with my Royal Blue set (apparently of 2nd generation locomotive vintage).

Is there any way to true these beasts, or is replacement unavoidable?

On EBAY I’m seeing an awful LOT of sellers offering metal wheels using ball bearing centers. The claim is that the bearings reduce rolling resistance (a quite logical assumption, IMHO).

Is the amount of friction reduction you gain significant? Like, for a long, maximum load train without these wheels, will a change to ball bearings allow you to tack on an extra car or two?

I can see the improvement of these things on curves; the independently rolling wheels will provide a differential action that might significantly reduce rolling resistance.

Next question…

The coaches have internal lighting, provided by a 9 volt transistor radio battery. I haven’t measured the current drain personally as yet, but the grain of wheat bulbs used just HAVE to REALLY suck current… and those batteries are no longer cheap (Radio Shack, you’ve stabbed me in the back!). The obvious solution is to upgrade the illumination system in the cars.

Obviously… LEDs are the way to go here; they’ll probably reduce current drain by 80%, as well as giving a longer life than bulbs. But that idea inspires going one step further.

The battery compartment on the cars is perfect for housing an LM-317 voltage regulator chip, fed by track pickups. I don’t doubt that others have taken that approach.

Checking the spec sheet on the chip, the low voltage drop-out voltage on the output side is 1.2 volts. If you set up the LED string with a current limiting resistor for 1.2 volts, the lights should go on at full intensity at very low speeds. If a single, small NiCad cell is also floated across the regulator output (a 1.2 volt device), the lights will stay on during full stops, and the cell will be recharged whenever the track DC is on.

What all of this has to do with wheels is simple… adding pickup brushes to trucks is the obvious move.

The cost of commercially made pickups is a bit scary, besides the fact that they look like they add a VERY significant amount of drag and rolling resistance.

I’m thinking a small chunk of PC board added to the truck that carries small brass sliding contacts that ride the inside of the wheels.

Can it be done with less friction / rolling resistance than commercially made wheel brushes?

Thanks in advance for the advice, Guys!

Mr. T.

#2

Hi Tom,

I’ve never seen the metal tired plastic wheels. That’s a new one for me. The current Bachmann metal wheels are cast in a lightweight alloy. Your observation of them not being very true is right on for almost all of the ones I’ve ever seen. Some are just OK, others make the car wobble.

AristoCraft, USA Trains an Gary Raymond make plated steel wheels that are turned on CNC milling machines. They are very true. Some of the older wheels were turned brass.

For power pick-up, the best way to go is ball bearing wheels. Aristo and others make them with solder tabs at each end of the axle. You get the best free-running and simple to wire power pick-up plus the advantage of very free rolling wheels.

Jon

#3

LGB “pizza cutters” are plastic with a metal tire.
I use almost exclusively Gary Raymond wheels.
Have been for years.
I may try some Sierra Valley wheels.
The worst I have found were the old San Vals.
jb

#4

Aristocraft wheels have been excellent for me but if your interested in scale accuracy the flanges are too big. Lots of people say they need to be regauged, but I’ve had very no problems.

In my limited experience the advantage of metal wheels is that everything tracks much better–stays on the tracks though switches and rough spots. I’ve never actually seen any plastic crud on my track, even when I ran cars with plastic wheels. I have my doubts about the utility of ball bearing wheels, except for power pickup. A well lubed axle rolls really freely. In my experience ball bearing wheels are great for power pickup

Lights and wheels:
I have a set of Bachmann coaches that I liked but they had power pickup via copper tabs that rubbed on the wheel flanges. Terrible–added lots of drag and an awful noise. I replaced them by getting one set of Gary Raymond Ball bearing wheels with power pickup per car. Expensive. But great–they rolled much much more freely and quietly.

That left me, though, with only two power pickup points per car. While I had them apart, I replaced the incandescent lights with LEDs, using a bridge rectifier and a large capacitor to eliminate flicker. I followed Dave Bodnar’s directions at

http://www.trainelectronics.com/LED_Articles_2007/LED_102/index.htm

It works really well–now the cars have constant lighting with no flicker at all and very very minimal drag. But it was expensive. It was only worth it I think, because we had detailed the coaches to fit our fictitious line, But now they run really really well.

Aristo’s lighted cars have a brass bushing in the truck sideframe. The bushing has a little solder tab on it. The wheel axle fits into the brass bushing, and transfers power to the lights. It’s a pretty good system with much lower drag than plungers or scrapers but it’s not as smooth as ball bearings. Depending on what kind of cars you have, you might be able to replace the trucks with aristo trucks with bushings

#5

Anyone have any info about those “black metal wheels” sold in sets of ten on ebay all the time? They always seem to get bid up pretty high.

#6

I convert virtually all rolling stock to Gary Watkins Sierra Valley Enterprises steel wheels. He has them in a variety of diameters for both 45mm and 32mm gauges. Good looking wheels for NG rolling stock and they are perfect in gauge and true. I get the plain steel ones and just let them rust. I’ve polished the tread on some, but it really isn’t worth it.

I’m just getting ready to order my first 32mm ones to go on some Binnie Engineering Hudson tipper cars I have on order. I’ve previously cut some Bachmann trucks down to 32mm by narrowing the bolster, and originally cut the axles to re-gauge them to 32mm, but the B’mann flanges are too fat to reliably go through the PECO SM32 turnout flangeways, so I’ll use the SVE wheelsets instead.

Happy RRing,

Jerry

#7
Ray Dunakin said:
Anyone have any info about those "black metal wheels" sold in sets of ten on ebay all the time? They always seem to get bid up pretty high.
Those are sold by Anakramer? That's the guy that jsut retired Sanval trains. Decided to seel only on Ebay. considering most of his stuff sold for more than retail prices at the store he made a good decision there. However when you consider the shipping prices across the country now it doesn't make sense to me.
#8

I’ll second the vote for Sierra Valley wheel sets. I run them on just about everything and they slip into Bachmann and Aristo arch bars with a perfect fit.
Later
Rick Marty