Lets see your Koki

[Tony Galiani]

They are very light.  In my limited experience, they run well as long as the track is good and you do not try to run them through tight radius turnouts.  Or tight radius curves for that matter.  I have a Minitix track set with some tight curved turnouts and they will not run through them.

They are fine on my Kato Unitrack temporary set up with No. 4 turnouts and R216 curves.

Ciao,

Tony

[Kingmeow]

I've tried them on 9-3/4 with no problems on my home layout but I'm meticulous in track laying.  However, I'll be running them on T-Trak where in the inner radius is 11" and the outer is 12"+.  In train shows where we mostly do combined (module) layouts, you never know what you're going to get as different people have different skill sets.

 

BTW, I had zero problems running my full 16 car N700S on the outer/red line of T-Trak, even at high speed.  This was a 32' x 32' combined layout in Altoona back in September.  Pretty breath taking to watch and drew a lot of attention.  Phones were out videoing!  😎

[cteno4]

We have run kokis in sets up to like 14 or so on our club Ttrak. For the most part all went well running them as is without weights added. Once in a while a car will decouple and probably from rapidos and module joints that peak or valley or just have a track bump. Sometimes flipping a car that decouples solves it and if one car keeps causing issues we just pull that car. We use to run long kokis on our old setup on the fly layouts that at times had some tight turns and non fixed track just popped together and never any issues.

 

i would give it a go on the show setup as is and see how it works for you before adding weights. Empty cars are very light but we have run a fair amount on our layouts with some empty or one 12’ container without noticeable issue. You could probably add some weight to and empty koki with some tungsten powder in areas in the underside of the framework and even create some pockets to glue in powder.

 

If you do weigh them you might think of just cutting a rectangle of thick corrugated cardboard the size of the opening to shove in the containers and then glue the weights into/onto the bottom of the blocks. Alternatively you could cut some foam rubber of EPS foam blocks instead of the cardboard. You could make a little jig to hold the cardboard and weight off the table just the right height and pop container over it to set it the same each time. Or glue a couple of rectangles onto the back side of the cardboard to rest against the inside top of the container and keep it seated just right. You could make a little jig to hold the cardboard and weight off the table just the right height and pop container over it to set it the same each time. Or glue a couple of rectangles onto the back side of the cardboard to rest against the inside top of the container to hold the bottom piece with the weight at jsut the right spot. You can also glue these in place with a couple of drops of PVA glue and if needed to remove just use a knife tip to pop the PVA off the plastic cleanly. You could get fancy and 3d print something for this.

 

This will get you out of hard gluing anything to the container and make a simple way to get the weights as low as possible to keep a low center of gravity on the cars to help with curve pulling stresses. Also helps any visual wobble when cars hit any track junction bumps. Also helps with any canted curve track.

 

Simple, washer and a hunk of corrugated cardboard.
 

I fiddled with this many years ago with all of thisto put magnets in tops and bottoms of containers so we could stack them quickly at shows in the container yard. I had it using a small piece of metal and a magnet each so you could align by had as magnet to magnet you had to get it dead on perfect alignment. It was a bit more fiddly as had to be more precisely and I dropped it for sometime later. This is where a 3d printed bit would probably be worth the trouble to align all the containers just right.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Kingmeow]

16 hours ago, cteno4 said:

If you do weigh them you might think of just cutting a rectangle of thick corrugated cardboard the size of the opening to shove in the containers and then glue the weights into/onto the bottom of the blocks. Alternatively you could cut some foam rubber of EPS foam blocks instead of the cardboard. You could make a little jig to hold the cardboard and weight off the table just the right height and pop container over it to set it the same each time. Or glue a couple of rectangles onto the back side of the cardboard to rest against the inside top of the container and keep it seated just right. You could make a little jig to hold the cardboard and weight off the table just the right height and pop container over it to set it the same each time. Or glue a couple of rectangles onto the back side of the cardboard to rest against the inside top of the container to hold the bottom piece with the weight at jsut the right spot. You can also glue these in place with a couple of drops of PVA glue and if needed to remove just use a knife tip to pop the PVA off the plastic cleanly. You could get fancy and 3d print something for this.

 

This will get you out of hard gluing anything to the container and make a simple way to get the weights as low as possible to keep a low center of gravity on the cars to help with curve pulling stresses. Also helps any visual wobble when cars hit any track junction bumps. Also helps with any canted curve track.

 

Simple, washer and a hunk of corrugated cardboard.

 

Excellent ideas Jeff!  I like the foam/carboard method as you just insert/pull them out as needed and no need to "ruin" the insides with PVA glue and what not.  I will try the foam first as you don't need to be as precise as with cardboard.  With cardboard I think you will need to have some pull tabs if it's wedged in there tight.  With foam, you just need a pick of some sort, even a pocket knife, to catch it and pull it out.

[cteno4]

@Kingmeow Brain dump on searching back more in dusty neuron paths…

 

Cutting the foam is the hard part, EPS is easy to cut up with a table saw precisely, but messy. But cutting small blocks on a regular 10” table saw can be challenging and dangerous. I have a baby 3.25” that’s better for this sized stuff, but again I hate the mess with EPS! Cutting EPS by hand is not easy and almost impossible to get very square. Using a hot knife is not a good option as it will leave melted edges that are no longer deformable (or easily cutable) to go over any little bumps and ridges on the interior of containers. In my fiddling with the magnets I found the EPS blocks a bit hard to get in and out of the containers and different manufacturers have different interior tabs and such and were hard to adjust while messing with them. There is no real give so you have to trim to pretty close to make it work well. I whacked up one piece out of denser foam rubber and it’s easy to fit, but it’s hard to cut accurately and I realized for the magnet stuff to easy to get out of alignment.

 

Corrugated cardboard actually worked out the easiest and most versatile and way easier to cut up precisely. it gives quite a bit for squishing in and went over ridges and such on the interior of the container. I remember one style of container had a vertical ridge on the interior of the container and it was easy to cut cut a slit into the edge of the cardboard and it formed easily around the ridge.
 

For depth placement the jig worked pretty well, it was just a rectangle of chipboard (about 2mm thick) a bit smaller than the inside of the container and a hole in the middle where the magnet could poke thru that was glued onto my rectangle. Put my magnet rectangle on top of the jig on the bench and push the container down on top of it. Seemed to work well, but I did not end up doing a large batch of them so don’t know the large scale reproducibility. My main concern was making sure the magnet was flush with the bottom edge of the container and that the cardboard was up high enough around the edges so that container clips on kokis would engage (so I could pop the  on kokis as well as in the yard). I do remember fiddling with depth on my first attempts manually by just prying the cardboard some with a xacto knife tip and I don’t remember it being a task at all and I was going for more alignment accuracy than you need for just weights. You can also just drill a holes in each corner to stick sharp tweezer tips into pry a bit if needed. My next round of testing was going to be to make a few dozen to compare magnet to magnet and magnet to steel and compare container alignment and ease of use but never got there.

 

For the weights it really doesn’t need to cardboard to be completely perfectly level in the container so I think t seconds with an xacto can get it close enough easily. Then a drop of PVA in each corner to hold in place well. All you need to do is sink the cardboard up into the container enough so that it does not interfere with the koki tab areas. If you use a washer as a weight it may be thick enough to automatically sink the cardboard deep enough.

 

Dont worry about PVA glue messing up your container. It only mechanically bonds to the styrene/abs plastic and just pops loose with a little tweak with a knife tip. Any stray bits easily popped off with knife tip or at works just stick a was of soaked paper towel inside the container for 5 minutes and any PVA will all wipe off. Other option is E6000 glue. It’s basically a thicker rubber cement. It grips well to just about anything but has a slightly flexible joints. But again its a physical, not chemical bond to the surfaces and can be peeled off of styrene/abs.

 

If you want the height of the cardboard weight piece perfect then it’s easy to glue a couple little rectangles of cardboard on top of it to rest on the inside top of the container to keep it just right. Probably no glue needed if decent tight fit of the bottom rectangle.

 

I just realized this is a perfect justification for a laser cutter! Super easy to make a little kit of these all cut out perfectly! I’ll add it to my justification list.

 

it also just dawned on me that adding the magnets also added weight, so it was a twofer.

 

cheers,

 

jeff

[Kingmeow]

I wasn't planning on EPS even though you suggested it.  For the reason you said, plain messiness with tiny bits of foam all over the place.  I was going to use high density foam.  I have a bunch of them of various sizes that came with electronics equipment.  They cut like EPS, very easily too with an X-Actor hobby razor saw.  No loose bits.

 

And because it is foam based you can squeeze it a little like a regular sponge.  I imagine if you cut each cube slightly over sized, there will be enough give/expansion once fitted to hold itself inside the container.  The high density allows you to cut holes, etc. so you can embed the weight(s) in and hold it with a drop of PVA glue.

 

BTW, I've made my own hot-wire foam cutter.  If the temperature is spot on you should not get hard melted edges.  If you are, your temperature is too hot.  All my cut edges are not hard and shows no burns, as if it was a factory edge.