A few days ago I volunteered to swap the trucks on a Hartford caboose for my pal Jerry (Naptowneng). His trucks were soft white-metal and kept bending, allowing the wheels to fall out. Accucraft had a sale on caboose trucks, and they looked perfect.
Unfortunately, the wheels on the new trucks were very finescale, and they kept picking the points on his track. In this pic, the top are the new ones, and the middle wheels are also Accucraft, taken from my set of steel hoppers.
So the plan was to swap the wheels from his trucks to the new Accu trucks. Little did I know how much fun it was going to be.
I took the wheels out of one of his trucks. They have thin, 2mm diam ends, which is most unusual - axles are usually 3mm or 4mm. The truck side had brass tubing as a bearing at one end, and the other had a ball bearing, with an OD of 5mm and an ID of 2mm. When I turned to the other side of the truck and found more ball bearings, the 2mm axles were explained.
I have previously bored out Accu axleboxes to take ball bearings, and it is a regular pain if you don’t have a good vertical drill, which I don’t these days. So I tried to make 4mm bearings from brass tube. The outer was easy, but there isn’t a good K&S size with a 2mm ID.
The Accu wheels from my hoppers was a good profile to replace the fine wheels in the new trucks. But the axles are too short! So I was stumped (English expression.)
The following day, looking at the pile on my workbench, I thought that I could take the hopper wheels and the Accu fine wheels off their axles and swap them. They can usually be tapped off, or a wheel puller does the job. (That’s a terminal puller from an Auto Parts store.)
I took the wheel off the new axle with the puller, and tapped the wheel off the hopper. What do I find but a knurled, shouldered axle for the hopper, and the wheel insulation insert was bigger than 4mm!
So if it was going to work, I’d have to take the insulation out of each wheels and swap them. About the only thing that was consistent was the hole in the wheels - they were the same at 6.5mm.
I knocked the insulator out of the first pair with brass tubing, but it got mangled.
I figured I needed something with a bit more surface, and the nut drivers came to mind. I found one that was 6mm OD and it did the trick on the old wheels and the new wheels for the second axle. Then I reset the back-to-back to 1.575" or 40mm, whichever came first.
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So all I need is to put the truck back together. Then do the other one.
On this first truck, I’d taken out the screws holding the springs, and wrangled the springs out, then twisted the sideframe to disengage it. Now I had to put the springs back - a very tedious job. Note the piece of string - essential when fitting springs, or you’ll be searching all over the floor when it ‘springs’ out.
After that I refit the brake hangers with these tiny bolts.
Underneath is the brake actuator rod, which has to be cut/unsoldered to get the wheels out. This first truck I had cut it - the second I just unsoldered it. Neither one wanted to be re-soldered but they were finally dealt with.
On the second truck, I unscrewed the U-shaped holder that I had noticed, and I removed just one side of the truck.
The tiresome process of replacing the wheels on the axles was repeated and the truck put back together. I fitted a short stub of brass tube to reduce the pivot hole, as the caboose came with a smaller bolt.
Then another problem raised it’s head. When I test fit a truck, it fouled the tie rods.
I was wondering what to do about this, as it wasn’t my caboose in the first place. It finally dawned on my that tie rods were in tension, so there’s no way they could have multiple bends. Who put this together? Jerry didn’t know, but he authorized me to fix them.
So I took them all off, bent them to shape, and glued them back.
And that was that. It only took about 10 times as long as I estimated.
