Is it my imagination or does different cleaning solutions affect the amount of drag of this car?
With laquer thinner, the car seems like it could be pulled around with the 0-4-0 but with Isopropyl alcohol it needs my intermountain FP7 to run it around. I haven’t tried Goo Gone yet.
yes, it does, ex. alcohol on the pad will absorb in the pad and cause it to add lots of friction. I don’t know about goo gone, but thinner is good too.
Yep, it does. I used Laquer Thinner at first. Be very, very ,very careful when you use that stuff! Not only is it not a good thing to breath, but it can do some melting of anything plasic on, in , or around the track shoul any get on it. Don’t ask me how I know this. I now stick to alcohol. It seems to work just fine. I have to use my USRA 2-6-6-2 or a lash-up of locos to pull it around, but it does a great job. Something I run in front of the loco when I clean is this:
Amazing what it picks up that shouldn’t be there…! I just glued a magnet to the bottom of an old flatcar I had (wrong period for my layout) and push it in front of the loco whenever I use the CMX track cleaning car.
Do you use 70% or 90% isopropyl alcohol?
Pardon my ignorance about this car, but is it distributed by Walthers and has two spinning motors driving pads and a HUGE weight concealed in a boxcar? If it is, it’s a good track-cleaning car, but I’ve always had to use one of my Yellowtones to get it around the layout. I mean, this baby is HEAVY!
Tom [:P]
I use the 90% when I can get it. Right now I am using the 70%. I don’t see a lot of difference, both work quite well. The 90% is probably a bit quicker on some types of dirt. I think the main thing is to be dilligent in cleaning the track for best operations. For me that means once a month or so. (More often if I have guests coming over to see the layout…[;)])
Tom, it is the CMX Clean Machine.
Ray, I’ll definetely need to go over my yard with a magnet after I finish rebuilding it… There’s track spikes all over the place from when they fly out when I’m pulling them. I can never find them all, they have a lot of force when you pull them out with needlenose pliers… Make sure you wear safety goggles! I learned how important that was when a spike flew out and hit my face when pulling them. Luckily I had safety goggles on, and it missed them anyway.
Safety first!
Absolutely! I have had the little end of the wire on some torti fly off into never, never land only to reapear on the magnet in a remote area of the layout 10 feet from where it was cut. Also when you use the dremel cut off wheel, there will be tiny little filings that will be picked up by the magnet (look close at the magnet in the photo where it is upside down and you will see them on the sides of the magnet) even after vacuming the entire area. The nice thing about putting one under a MOW car is that all the tracks will be cleaned of the metal bits as you are cleaning the track…