Wheel Cleaning

[Guest Closed Account 1]

Today I spent the greater part of the afternoon cleaning wheels on my many locomotives. Bought a length of code 80 and 2 bumpers just for the dirty job. Will mount on wood later.

 

Powered wheels cleaned on the Tsugawa TGW 12503 Wheel polisher. Works on DCC and DC.

 

Although the rail heads showed little evidence of dirt, the webbing had to be coked pretty thick.

 

The Non-Powered wheels were so dark that the lights only shined for 2 laps on my brand new Kato 800 Sakura.

 

Perhaps the cleaner car broke up the dirt and the car wheels picked it all up.

 

Anyway, following the advice of the old rails at my club, I used rubbing alcohol to remove the dirt from the wheels.

 

Tried using soaked napkins across code 80 rails. Not so good as the track length must be pretty long and the alcohol dries up pretty quickly.

 

Then tried direct soaking.  Used a plastic lid large enough to accommodate the whole car or locomotive without the body touching the sides. First poured enough alcohol onto the lid just enough to cover the surface. Then spun the wheels so that the dirtiest half went into the drink first.

 

Idea is to get the meniscus to climb up the wheels and soak them for me and not touch the metal pickups or washout the gears.

 

After 5 minutes, I had some clean wheels on the new locomotives.  All others took longer (30 minutes) or I had to manually clean them with finger rubbing. Then soaked anyway.

 

Drying the wheels is accomplished by laying napkins/cloth across the tracks and pushing down some on the cars by hand a few times. Lift the napkin and you'll see the dirt.

 

Is coating the rails with Automatic Trans fluid a good way to break up dirt and lube up the gears or does the loose dirt work its way upward into the trucks rendering the process counterproductive?

[cteno4]

webskipper,

 

ive found that using a cleaning wheel like the aztec or centerline really helps clean the rails and get the gunk out so that its not picked up by the wheels. many cleaning cars spread the cleaning fluid, but dont do a great job of picking up the loosened dirt. the toweling you put around the centerline wheel really helps pick up all the gunk well.

 

never tried automatic transmission fluid, would worry it might leave residue on the tracks. many folks use orange oil as the heavy cleaner, then follow it up with isopropanol to clean off any residuals from the orange oil.

 

one trick to clean engine wheels is to do the same soaked papertowel (use the good fiber kind that dont fall apart easily) across the track and put one truck on the track to get power and the other on the paper towel to clean it.

 

another approach is to flip over the loco in a little nest of foam or a towel. then use probes to provide power to one truck and then just put a soaked qtip onto each wheel to clean it. this way you can do the traction tires lightly as to not burn them up. its a little of rubbing your belly and patting your head to do this, but you can get good at it with a bit of practice.

 

only issue with really soaking engine trucks when cleaning them like this is you will probably drive out a lot of your lubrication and may have to re lube them some.

 

ive found the paper towels over the rail has worked well for me for no powered cars, its rare that i have any that are really mucked up. if its really bad i will resort to the fingernail and qtip by hand if needed!

 

cheers

 

jeff

[The_Ghan]

Skip,

 

You get my Post Of The Month award for this one !!!

 

Cheers

 

The_Ghan