Re-Powering a Favorite

Howdy again!  This time I come bearing improvements that worked right the first time!

I bought an Athearn SD45T-2 a while back and I made posts on it and its progress here and here.  I finally got the replacement dogbone drive shafts that I mentioned last time.  If you recall, the model came with 1.609" shafts, and after putting in the new motor one of the drive shafts was short.  From what I could tell the best fix would be the 1.76" shafts.  Voila!  They are just right!  Below shows the shaft in the flywheel and gear tower.  It really is a perfect fit.

 

I gave the motor a few spins with the drivetrain fully assembled and I felt no resistance or binding.  So next up is to put the whole shebang back together and run it on the rails.  Hopefully she will run with the other Genesis locos well enough to consist them together.  Since I am finally going to join a club, I can really use the heavy haulers.

For a visual, here are the two different drive shafts side-by-side.

Check back soon as I will be updating with the performance of this over-hauled locomotive.

Making it modular

I have been slowly working on the layout these past months.  The biggest roadblock has been deciding the future of the layout.  We may be moving into a smaller house soon so I have been trying to figure out the best way to divide the layout into movable sections.  More on that other stuff later.

I had always planned on the layout being modular, as my wife and I's plan for our current living situation seems to be so fluid.  I built the frames individually, made track plans based the frame lengths, etc.  However, I went full bore on laying out the decking plywood and the track.  This turned out badly (read: stupidly) as cutting through track with standard cutting implements has proven ...difficult.  Most saw blades are too rough (too few Teeth Per Inch) and would tear the track up or separate it from the plywood.  So to make the layout "modular" I had to improvise ("as usual" he said disdainfully).

The biggest difficulty is cutting through the decking where track is already laid.  The best way I found was to cut the track was with a razor saw over where the modules meet.  Then I used a small drill bit and drilled through the plywood between and around the ties as much as possible.  The plywood was cut using regular hand and powered saws (the easiest part).  To finish it off, I used a hack saw blade to cut the plywood that was still connected beneath the track.  I would have used the razor saw but the blade is not deep enough to cut the track and plywood together.  I angled the hack saw blade in the existing cuts and slowly leveled it out as I cut upward.  It took awhile but it eventually worked.

 

 

So now that the layout is cut up, I can work on finishing the yard.  It works well right now but needs some tweaking.

For my final thought of the day: be sure that if you make your layout modular, you cut the decking before laying track.