Speaking of washers I happened to come across this kit and for a quite reasonable price: There is also a 4 brush kit available. Scratch built is better but this gives some ideas as to how one could construct their own.
freddy that would help in building one of those washers/cleaners. Thanks maybe i can get sumtin 3d printed at some point. i dont have room for one yet . but future build plus it would be fun to print one out and maybe use the pipe cleaner trick for brushes .......
I used Raw brand unbleached hemp fibers pipe cleaners. The color and the texture make very realistic brushes. The little car washer is 30 N scale feet in length by 32 N scale feet high. When buried in ballast the brushes come just above the car or loco trucks. The interior width is 18 feet.
One of my rainy day projects was to take a set of covered hoppers that performed poorly on the track and demo them using the tops to make some covered gons out of some good running MT gons. 2022-11-28_18.48.27 by John Moore posted Jun 17, 2023 at 6:46 PM
Somewhere under layers of incredibly stubborn and poorly-applied paint there's allegedly an Atlas FM H-24-66. A long soak in 99% isopropyl alcohol, time in an ultrasonic bath, and several hard scrubs have made some headway, but this paint is TOUGH. I'll check it again tomorrow.
Well, Mode 1 of the TC4 is working fine. I ran into a couple issues. At first it worked perfectly, but then I added the code for stations 3 and 4 and the tram would go a few seconds and stop repeatedly. A few minutes in the monitor and I found out that the floating voltage on the line with no sensors attached was delivering a signal that told the Arduino to stop the tram. I fixed this by adding a jumper between the +5v and signal lines, which brought the value up to 1023 and that is a go signal. The delay timing took a few to get right, and in the end all is good. Next I tackled the Mode 2, code and here is where everything started to fall apart. I mean not completely, but I ran into an issue with the train not wanting to go in reverse. I checked all my pin outs, I checked all the code, and it still wouldn’t work. The code for this is simple, it goes like this: digitalWrite(10,HIGH); digitalWrite(9,LOW); and the train goes clockwise. Now the code for the reverse is just the opposite: digitalWrite(10,LOW); digitalWrite(9,HIGH); And with this the train doesn’t go at all. So, I’m hoping it’s not the chip as I soldered it in place, but I can’t see how it could be anything else. I will build another board tomorrow and have a socket for the driver chip instead of soldering it in place. Oh and I found the resistors used for the voltage divider for the potentiometer to throw off the reading, and without the resistors it reads perfectly. So I may just use jumpers there on the next batch.
While the Train Master soaks, I'm looking over an Atlas GP9. I'd hoped to use the mechanism for my low-nose GP9, but the LL shell is too narrow for the Atlas frame. It'll be simpler to find another LL frame and modify it to fit a GP9 fuel tank. And I guess that means I have two GP9s in progress now...
my bench/desk has been pretty busy building sumners throttle. I still need a few parts that are on order. shipments are getting slower an slower. I need batteries an a new oled an a few more buttons (i may omit two of them )...
Nothing on the workbench now. Had 20 freight cars that needed wheel sets cleaned this morning. Its been 6+ months with lots of running. 80 axles...160 wheels...2 hours. But the trains will climb a grade with ease now !!
lil more soldering done on my WiFi throttle. still waiting on more parts. ive got a do not order list started for those vendors that dont work out. this vendor of the battery im still waiting on has now been put on that list. i should probably make a good vendor list as well..... i order most of my parts from china land as its much cheaper, (i know i should order from usa) but there parts are coming from over there too, so why not save a bunch of money.....
Yes, many US-supplied electronic components are indeed manufactured in China. But in factories, and under processes, that the US firms enforce, because their reputation is at stake OVER HERE. When you procure parts from US distributors, you are supporting profits, jobs, spending, investment, and even taxes here in the US. When you bypass them for cheaper parts from who knows whom in China, you are instead supporting business, employment and taxes over there that, at best, helps us not. Low-cost Chinese retail suppliers are rampant with substandard procurement, storage, packing and shipping processes. US distributors deal with verified, reputable suppliers (even in China) that adhere to standards ensuring quality. Just think about what the few dollars more you might spend with a reputable US distributor buys. Here is a list of the leading US Electronics Distributors: https://www.supplychainconnect.com/...956/2022-top-50-electronics-distributors-list Of them, I have found Mouser (HQ local to me) and Digikey cater to the electronics hobbyist particularly well, with decent prices on low minimum quantity orders.
yes i do believe in us products but only if there made here. but im not gunna pay $15 bucks for something i can get for $1.35 thats made in the same place.. I had a whole lot to say about this but im gunna leave it alone. ill venture into your link and have a looksy........Thank You
Thank you for the list @BigJake. I've used Digi-Key and RS Group (used to be known as Allied Electronics) and have been well pleased. A few years ago I tried Newark and after long delays and phone calls, learned that if you don't set up an account, your orders are set aside for someone to manually review the payment, even if by credit card. At the time these were piling up at a rapid rate and orders were unfillled. The people managing the phones at Newark were very kind and fished my orders from the stack and approved them for shipment, but the entire process took far too long. Perhaps they've since worked to eliminate these delays.
I've been using DigiKey a fair amount lately and some in the past also. Parts are very reasonable, shipping is fast and usually about $5 for the items I buy as they don't weigh much. I can easily find caps, diodes, and other items you won't find easily on Amazon or eBay and buy them in quantity one if needed which is nice at very reasonable prices. Saying that I still buy a number of things that are easy to find elsewhere. I've had some problems with the inexpensive momentary push-button switches I've bought off Amazon and eBay and I'm sure they are made in China. I think the problem is you have to be very careful soldering to them and if they get too hot they don't switch reliably. So at this point think the problem has not been on the manufacturing end but my installing end. I did consider spending more money on them so looked on Digikey and to me most of the ones I found unless they were a lot more expensive than what I've been buying also came from China and looked to be just like what I've been buying. So unless you are welling to pay considerably more chances are you are likely to get about the same product. Of course this is merely my view and I haven't done any real research on it. I will say that I now check switches and anything else I can with an VOM before installing and if there is a problem after installing it is probably on me. Sumner
You're welcome, Hardcoaler! Over my career, I dealt with almost all of them. The list of largest distributors is of course tilted towards those that serve manufacturing clients, but it also includes reputable distributors that serve individual customers well. All are large enough to demand quality standards on the manufacturers, wherever the latter are located. Part of the point I'm trying to make is that the value chain for electronics components includes distribution, not just manufacturing. We may not have choices where a given component type is manufactured anymore, but we do still have choices for product distribution. As an electronic design engineer for systems, circuit boards and FPGAs, I dealt professionally with many of these distributors and their sales reps, to get product and test data, and sometimes even samples (for lab experiments and evaluation only, never for product manufacturing). When necessary, they would arrange meetings (in person or over the phone) with factory reps, test engineers, application engineers and product development engineers to help us with any issues or to relay our evaluation results. In turn, the latter would rely upon us to tell them what future products/features/improvements we might need. And when our production teams had problems getting components in time to meet delivery schedules, they relied upon these same distributor reps to speed things up. Like in every kind of business, relationships matter! Most importantly, these are local people with families to feed, mortgages to pay, and kids to send to college. I'd rather the distribution part of the value chain go to them, while it still can, even if the transaction is entirely online, where one might think it doesn't really matter.
