I HAVE TRIED it - for two years -because like you I read an article. (I also used to clean TV tuner’'s in a repair shop with Carbon Tet… After applying we wiped the loosened black off with a rag. You?
May I respecfully suggest you try your own advice?
[%-)]
Something I am not understanding.
Oil eliminates friction, right? Doesn’t your loco have a problem with a grade even with a light film of oil?
re: Big_Boy …abrasives …will leave scratches…
If the track is nickel plated, will Bright Boy or other abrasives eventually remove the plating?
REX
Of Course! but One has to have a grade to realize it.
I’ll let Elliot answer that one. He doesn’t need any help.
Don’t like it…period. Normally we use a pair of cenerline track cleaning cars with an abrasive pad cleaning car prior to operating at my club. We had a member on his own apply wahls to the track and it caused all sorts of problems…slippage, dust and crud accumilation and oil build up on older Athearns with the porous (sp) sintered metal wheels. I took quite some time to eliminate the effects of that. I am a firm believer in abrasive pads and 99 perent isopropyl alcohol to clean the tracks clean and crud free.
Thanks Don.[;)] Rex, first of all nickel silver rail isn’t plated, it’s a solid alloy. I’m not sure how much silver, if any, is in it. Silver by itself would be worse than brass as far as oxidation is concerned. This is why most modelers don’t use brass track. I’m not even sure why they bother to make it anymore.
Hair clipper oil is not a track cleaner, it is a track “conditioner”. My understanding of how it works is as follows. Because it is electrically conductive, it is able to “fill in” microscopic holes, thus giving better ELECTRICAL contact between the wheel and the rail. Yes there will be a slight amount of slippage, but when the oil is proprely distributed it should hardly be noticable.
Back in the early 80’s, I was living in Denver. There were a couple of guys that had layouts at their homes, and decided to try this new thing called CTC-16. CTC-16 is basicly the granddaddy of DCC. These guys were pioneers in command control, back when it was first hitting the market. They had to assemble all of their own recievers, command stations, and power stations. At first there were only a couple of board designs to choose from, and so they would cut and fit, and make them work.
These guys went to great lengths to make this early system work. In many cases, they took the wheels off their engines and did their own nickel plating. The digital signal required the best possible contact between the wheel and the rail, in order for the trains to run smoothly. This is where the hair clipper oil came in. By treating the rails, there was a noticabl
Club layouts may not be a good place to try this concept, since there is always a wide variety of equipment coming and going. Those old Athearn wheels were some of the worst offenders when it came to poor electrical contact. The guys in Denver that I mentioned in the previous post, actually plated a few sets before NWSL came out with replacement wheels for those engines.
Does the club use DCC???
To add fuel to the fire. Take a look at your old MR Feb 02 edition"Workin" on the RR by Lionel Strang.
Also my latest loco wheel cleaning procedure. Just added an old start up power pack to my work bench (overhead lighted magnifying lamp) loco cradle holder and my favorite cleaner. It’s gets easier/cleaner
sitting down. Wonder why it took me years to make this move?
Here’s another country heard from.
We dont use any of the above!
We used to clean track with bright boys…
We used to use alcohol based cleaners…
We used to Use RailZip…
Now we use Dexron 3,
Yes, thats Automatic Transmission fluid in conjuction with EVERYONE using metal wheel sets on EVERYTHING! The ATF conditions the rails just like Wahl oil and RailZip, but at a fraction of the cost. Being a modular club, we have no grades to speak of. Frequent running of trains with all metal wheels cuts our cleaning time to almost none. True, occasionally we may have to hand clean a section because of crud that builds up, but its rare. Wheelset cleanings are ever rarer!
Our track cleaning cars are getting very dusty ,
Go figgure![%-)]
Yes the club is DCC. Our experience was not good. I don’t think there was an appreciable increase in conductivity. If there was, it was not sufficient enough to overcome the problems. And in any club environment, unilateral actions need to benefit the greatest number of members, or put another way, negatively impact the least number of members, so if using the oil created more complaints than not using it…clean dry track seems to make everyone realtively happy.
Don,First any advice I give is from my own experiences or what I seen done first hand and I pay little attention to articles in any model magazine or take them as the only correct answer…I trust you do the same?
Now then…As I stated we been using channel turner cleaner for the last 12 years at the club with no ill affects.80% of the time we do not clean track by using the old Athearn F7 dummy with a bright boy attach on the bottom before operating.Yard tracks seldom get clean before operation as well without any ill affects from not cleaning the tracks before operation…However twice a year we have a track cleaning Saturday at the club where we clean the track then spray on the channel turner cleaner and we are good to go for 6 more months…I am yet to clean my HO industrial switching layout after cleaning and spraying on the channel turner cleaner with no side affects that one would expect from not cleaning track…
As I stated some time back on the Atlas forum I fully believe most modelers worry more about cleaning track then they do running trains thanks to the magazine experts that think they have all the correct answers on how things work…No,the best teacher is experience.Find what works best for you and stay with it…Be not afraid to go against the gain of the so called experts or every new idea that comes along in some magazine…Your hobby life will be less complicated.
Brakie, Et al:
PHYSICS 101:
OIL is OIL: Frozen oil becomes wax.
Wax coats. So does oil. The difference is TEMPERATURE.
If it’s thin enough, it can CONDUCT electricity. So does water.
SOLVENTS loosen dirt. So do DETERGENTS. - BUT …
Neither REMOVES dirt. (Notice the inclusion of the word “move”).
This takes removal: Absorbing, blotting, rinsing, or transferring.
In our HO WORLD: your choice is removing by …wiping, or ‘blotting’ - or letting your wheels pick it up. Everything else is OLD WIVES TALES. In Chuck Walsh’s situation he is applying a cleaning agent to his wheels and the cotton swab pick’s up the dirt. I do the same thing except we may use different solvents. When the cotton swab is no longer dirty, I move on to another wheel.
I think some are truly believing the word "Cleaner’ printed on the can. Even on windows one removes the smudges with a cloth - after spraying ‘cleaner’ on them.
IN A CLUB situation, a double roller - one wet followed by dry - will show you where the dirt actually goes.
Brakie: Your club may clean it’s track only twice a year - but it’s because everyone’s wheels are doing such a good job. Try rolling one of your cars on a Alchohol impregnated paper towel sometime.
KBFCSME; Transmission Oil? (Shudder). Isn’t ‘Transmission Oil’ a low viscosity oil with detergents and anti-foamers in it?
Don,If we had dirty wheels like you claim we have then certainly our locomotives will not run as smooth as they do.Thats is the first law of dirty wheels -spotty performance…
We use metal wheels on our freight and passenger cars again we have no excessive build up of crude other then what is normal over a year’s time or more likely if we even bother to check the cars or engine wheels in a years time so it may be longer then that…
So,One more time…Channel turner cleaner works very well for us.Had I not seen this and use it myself I to would be a skeptic…
Brakie. Has it occured to you that the ENGINE is the only thing using electricity - and it’s normaly at the head-end of the train? CLUE?? - I give up.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste
Why don’t you all agree to disagree on this? Dave
Easy now boys, see what I mean about there being two camps on this one.
To me, the $64,000 question is, does Eric Brooman still advocate this practice 23 years after it was published? Has he moved on to something else for his railroad? Maybe Andy Sperandeo will weigh in on this one tomorrow.[;)]
I would suspect rail dirt, per Tonys Train Exchange, is the result of a combination up to three maybe four sources of contamination and the environmental factors where our trains operates.
(AZ garage, no humidity,no AC, Mi garage, too much humidity, no AC, down in the basement,
up in a spare AC room etc, the use of a dehumidifier, smokeless rooms etc. Lots of variables here.
Our layouts may not be victim of all those combined consequences, therefore the results achieved by using different products may produce the same net result, Clean Track.
One cleaner Tony recommends with his clean machine is lacquer thinner. I have that . Too
explosive for this old fart. I don’t want to learn the hard way.
I’ve been hearing pros and cons of hair clipper oil ever since Model Railroader had black and white covers. Never had the courage to try it, because it’s called OIL and I’ve got a couple of spots with 2.4% grades on my layout. Since my layout is in a garage, I’ve had lots of trouble with ANY liquid on the rails, since it just turns whatever dust creeps in into a sludge. I use a vacuum cleaner and a mild abrasive pad similar to a Brite Boy. I have used Radio Shack contact cleaner on turnout points and it works quite well, you just have to be careful not to go crazy when you spray it on. But the thought of oil on my tracks kind of gives me the Willies.
Take it from the PRO,NIGEL.
“There is NO silver in “Nickel Silver”. A typical composistion is: Copper 65%, Nickel 10% and Zink 25%. It is a member of the brass family”.
Exactly why it works! [:D]
No other oil comes close to the detergents in ATF. I have literally seen dirty wheels clean up just by applying ATF to them and running them a bit in a cradle with Dexron 3 on the swab.
I first got the idea after a club member brought Railzip to the layout, and it seemed to work fine, until it dried out. See, RailZip is water based. Oils tend to dry out at a much slower rate. Plus my day job sometimes puts me up to my elbows in a transmission, replacing little plastic & electrical parts!
As far as traction, you just cannot overdo it. We still manage to run 110+ car trains with usually only 3 Atlas Geeps as power.
But I realize Don that this is all lost on you. I simply threw the idea out in case someone else may get some use of it.
Differn’t stroke for differn’t folks, ya know?[^]
Don,I give up on you,think as you wish and say as you will…Locomotive wheels picks up crude just like cars…You should know that…Channel turner cleaner works far better then anything I found yet and that is speaking from experience.