Hi There;
I just bought one of these on ebay for a guy in my club. There were some threads awhile ago about problems & fixes for these. I did a forum search with no luck. Can anybody help?
Thanx in advance; Tom
The main problem I had with mine was the gear mesh for the motorizing kit. It would slip and not turn the table. I drilled out the mounting holes for the motor kit to a slightly bigger size to allow the motor gear to move in closer and make better contact. Turned well since then.
A second problem is with the copper contacts to provide power to the rails on the bridge. They tend to wander and you loose power to the rails at times. I haven’t quite found a solution for this. I’ve seen posted where other people have soldered the wires to the two contacts on the shaft and are just careful not to turn in circles to many times to avoid twisting the feeder wires. I’ll be watching myself to see if anyone has a better solution to the power issue to the rails.
If you are operating on DCC you have to wire in a reversing module to the bridge rail feeders to avoid any shorts to the roundhouse rails etc.
Take a look at this thread:
http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?page=-1&TOPIC_ID=39232&REPLY_ID=405942#405942
I built a Heljan TT which uses the same drive as the Walthers kit. I wanted to be able to remove my bridge, so I frabracated my own drive shaft and electrical pick up. The drive coupling is a home made version of THIS
One very important step in the assembly is the lower bearing plate. I don’t know if the Walthers TT is built the same as the Heljan, but the bridge hight has to be just right. The trucks on the ends of the bridge should ride very lightly, most of the weight should be carried by the bearing. The Heljan kit has a lower bearing plate that glues into the center hole of the pit. That has to be positioned just right (I found that out too late and had to use a .010 shim from a generator pully on an old VW bug to raise the bearing). The bridge is attached to the upper bearing plate and my drive shaft is attached to that. The shaft has to be centered perfectly. I did that by slipping a brass tube through the factory hole, to use as a locating tool and slid the new drive shaft over that. Once the driveshaft was attached, the tool is removed.
I also mounted the electrical pick up differently. I seperated the two wipers and mounted them on the ends of square brass tubing and attached to the wooden base… They wipe the brass rings which are mounted on the drive shaft and connected to the bridge rails. I made the driveshaft out of brass tubing and insulated it from the power pick up rings with heat shrink tubing. The rings are made from brass tubing. The connection of the motor side of the driveshaft was made from of the guts out a Eurostyle strip connector. On the other end of the connector I made a “T” from round brass rod which fits into a slot cut into the driveshaft. The polarity is corrected by a MRC power reversing module.
Hi There;
Thanx for your help Guys. I knew I could count on you. I printed this page out for my friend.
Thanx: Tom