It’s funny how sometimes the simplest of things will lead you down a rabbit hole. I am continuing to clean the train room and put stuff away. I noticed an Intermountain truck I had assembled with San Juan plastic Proto48 wheelsets sitting in it. They fit perfectly and roll great. But they are plastic wheel sets so you can’t polish the wheel surface and plastic wheels tend to pick up a lot of dirt.

Having that truck in my hand and a having a clean workbench, led to pulling out a Protocraft wheelset to look at. Which led to measuring the wheelsets and then the next thing you know out comes the wheel puller and more mearuring to see if the wheels could be placed on the San Juan axels. Nope, they would need to be machined to fit properly, not a quick solution.

This led to thinking about adding a point to the ends of the Protocraft axels. Which meant the Shereline lathe came out onto the workbench. Which led to the question, how can I hold that tiny axel in the lathe?

I looked at trying to hold Protocraft axel in the chuck. Not the best of ideas because of all the erregular surfaces of the protocraft axel. Might have worked with a straight axle. Which led to should I make new axels? No, this is meant to be a simple solution. Which lead to finding my collets…. which lead to a whole other search. Turned out the collets were where they should be and I just looked right past them. That really wasn’t the best way (for my set up) to hold them either. Which led to thinking about a set up I’ve used to polish wheel treads using the chuck and a steady rest.

Now before the machinists in the crowd start rolling their eyes, I should remind you that I did not take metal shop in High School, I took art classes. And as a machinist, I turned out to be a good Graphic Designer.

Well it worked, but putting the wheels back on the axel turned out to be more to think about. They were is perfect gauge from the manufacturer and when the day started. A simpler solution was needed.

As you can see I found a simpler solution, leave the wheels mounted on the axels. The axel is held by the chuck, supported on the other end by the steady rest. The wheel treads get polished and a file is used to add the point on the axel.

Here is the before and after of the Protocraft axels. They now drop into the Intermountain truck and it rolls great.

I tried cutting the point but that put forces on the axel in this set up which caused it to move. If I had used a collet and just held the axel then that would have worked. But I didn’t need close tolerances on the point, I just needed a point on the end of the axel.

I also want to mention that I said in the last post that the workbench would not stay as clean as it was. It didn’t.

That worked so well, I built up ten pairs of trucks.

The imported trucks from Protocraft and RY Models are GREAT! I own more pairs of them than I want to admit. Sometimes, you just don’t want to put a $52 pair of trucks under a $20 freight car.

Putting away one Intermountain truck with San Juan plastic wheels led to this. But notice, I was good about putting away the lathe and I’m back to a clean workbench.

Now, what cars do I want to put these trucks under…..