Doh!

I spent a bit of time at the workbench Friday morning, building a gear tower for my Ew project. I had the worm drive left over from the first attempt at this project (the bogies of which wound up under the twinset railcar) along with the associated bearing blocks. My plan was to build a brass box to sit on top of the bogie holding the worm drive in the correct orientation and also provide a mounting point for the top of the bogie to the frame. the first job was to add guides to a piece of sheet brass that would hold the worm drive in place horizontally). This was a couple of bits of brass square tube soldered into the correct place on the brass sheet.


I then cut the brass sheet in 1/2 (as there needs to be 2 sides) and found that the locating bars were too deep for the sides of the tower to sit on the bogie as i had intended. No matter I thought, I'll just file them down.

Well, it was sort of working, but I suddenly realised something else. I had been aware that I would have to cut some parts away from the brass strip in order to clear some parts of the bogie mounting that I couldn't remove (something about holding the drive train on or some such rubbish). This suddenly become a lot of work,and my brain desperately tried to find a simpler way around this so it could go back to a nap. The solution was very simple. Why not use the designed mountings which would set up the worm drives correctly (remember that I orginally purchased the bogies from Atlas as spares).

'SD-9 mech to show what I mean'

10 minutes on the Atlas website, and I had all the bits I needed ordered and on the way. I'm now wondering why the hell I didn't think of this before. Its so sodding obvious. All I will have to do is cut the frames up and set up the new universal drives in the right locations.