A good firend of mine was displaying his Modern era Lionel Texas Special Set at a local train show a few weekends ago. An unfortunate accidental uncoupling of cars caused the Station Sounds Diner car to plunge to the floor.
This fall of about 36 inches mangled one of the trucks. Luckily nothing else was seriously harmed. I took the unit home to repair it for my friend.
With some careful work, I was able to straighten out the internal sheet metal axle frame assembly, but I had one axle that was seriously bent right at the point of where axle enters the rear of the sintered iron wheel. The wheels on these Modern era cars are pressed onto the axles, so I could not simply remove the wheel and straigthen the axle separately. The axle in question also contains the magnet for the Hall Effect rotational sensor (to activate in-motion sound effects), and these magnets can be quite fragile. Thus I decided to try straightening the axle without having to press the wheel off.
I placed a couple of pieces of aluminum bar in the cross slide vise on my bench drill press and adjusted the vise to hold the AL strips at track gauge. I then chucked one of my large punches into the drill press and aligned the cross-slide vise to allow me to press on the axle as shown in the photo below.
This setup worked extremely well. After a few presses and eyeballing the axle assembly, I had the axle and wheel turning true again.
I also used the vise to reset the outer truck frame assembly to the right guage for the axles. I put some cardboard on the vise to protect the truck frames from scratches.
So the story has a good news outcome. I was able to reassemble the truck assembly, replace a light bulb that fractured upon impact, and the reassemble the diner car. After a reset and reprogramming the ENG ID code,