What is the best way to get better pulling performance from my life like and bachmann steam locos. Can weight be easily put in the body of these N Scale locos? Should I fit traction tires to a driver set? Can i just put the tires on or do I have to change out the driver set to accomplish this. (The tire would increase the diameter of the wheels too much ?)
Thanks
David
Bull Frog Snot.
I agree. Bull Frog Snot is amazing stuff.
The argument hasn’t reared its head in a couple of months now but there’s a guy over on the Atlas Forum who makes a very good argument that the basic problem with N-Scale steam is that the worm/wormgear/spurgear driving arrangement is very inefficient and that inefficience increases with progressively smaller scales; what is needed, he advocates, is some sort of a helical/hypoid drive system to take most of the energy absorbing friction out of drive-train. Afterall, rearwheel drive vehicles don’t have a worm/wormgear/spurgear driving arrangement . . . . . . . . . . where did Henry Ford go wrong? This guy does admit that his proposed drivetrain would probably add somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five percent to the retail price of each locomotive.
A fellow I know – a journeyman machinist – takes all his N-Scale steamers and grooves the treads on his drivers; he then applies neoprene to the tread and turns the wheels true on a lathe. He claims he gets between 20 and 25 percent improvement in performance that way. Were I into steam . . . . . . . . . . and I might just go there if anyone were to offer an affordable H-8 or an M#/M4 . . . . . . . . . . instead of high horsepower modern diesels I suppose I’d fire up my old Unimat and give this procedure a whirl.
Increased weight . . . . . . . . . . if you can find a place for it . . . . . . . . . . might help; as it is I suppose there is some merit in this new Bullfrog Snot . . . . . . . . . .God! I have hated that word since I was a kid! There have been a couple of articles in the hobby press about using it and it seems to do a pretty good job.
Me? When I need more traction I just do what the prototype does: add another unit or two onto the point of my freight. Works like a charm every time.
Well in most ( all) of my steam locomotives the drivers slip on the rails. Now if the locomotive would stall the motors I would think that a better gear system might help. As it is now most units simply do not have enough weight to provide traction effort to the rails. That is why we see some units that come with traction tires Weight will help but , you are hard pressed to find a place to add more weight. On top of that, you need to add the weight in the correct place or you could decrease the pulling power by upsetting the balance of the unit. Bullfrog Snot does help. You do loose some electrical pickup when using it.
.
You could always use a powered boxcar right behind the engine.
http://www.randgust.com/prod04.htm
The video showing this is pretty cool
I read on another forum thread a while back that one guy did a test between bullfrog snot and double stick tape just on one driver wheel. He concluded that the tape was just as good if not slightly better than the BFS. It wasn’t so much the fact the tape was sticky, but that it had a slightly rubber texture after the sticky wore off. If it was me, I’d go with the BFS and see if that solves your problem before exploring weighting, etc.
Chris