Ztrains: Clean Locomotive Wheels

Keep Your Loco's Wheels Clean
Here's a very simple and effective wheel cleaner that will help you maintain smoother running locomotives by insuring solid electrical contact at your locomotive's wheels. There are wire wheel cleaners on the market, and they do a very good job of cleaning the hardened oil, dirt and general grime that can accumulate on your loco's wheels. You can read more about these cleaners on David Karp's Z scale website, http://www.zscale.org. While these cleaners do remove much of the hardened grime, I also wanted a cleaner that would focus more on wiping and removing the liquid oil, dirt and grime. I found a commercial cleaner like this, but only for HO scale trains. It's essentially a section of track with a small Velcro backed cleaning pad placed in the center of it's length. The idea is to hold the locomotive on the track with your hand, apply power to the track, then gently move the locomotive over the cleaning pad... the wheels turn and get cleaned.

I wanted to use readily available materials for my cleaner rather than using special order cleaning pads... if replacement pads are as close as your local drugstore, chances are you'll use them more often. I've been using round foam makeup pads, cut into quarter sections, for some time now to clean my track. I use isopropyl alcohol on the quartered pads and it cleans the track very well. These foam pads have the advantage over other cleaning materials of being relatively firm, very dense, and not tearing or leaving any lint behind. The isopropyl alcohol I use is the 99% variety, instead of the 70% type. The remaining ingredient in alcohol is water, so the 99% alcohol is a much better choice.

Since some Z scale locomotives aren't even as long as these pads, I wouldn't be able to use the cleaning pad in the center of a long section of track as the HO cleaner does. Instead I built what looks like a little locomotive turntable, it's a section of powered track with the cleaning pad recessed at one end, sitting flush with the rails. Since the entire locomotive isn't resting on track during the actual cleaning process, you have to make sure you maintain contact between the power pickup wheels and the track during cleaning. It's really not much more difficult than actually placing a Z scale locomotive on the track to begin with. Once you have the locomotive on the track, you apply power and move the locomotive over the pad to clean. A big advantage this round pad cleaner has over the commercially available models is that after a single pass with your loco, you can rotate the pad slightly for the next pass. This gives you a clean section to work with rather than running your wheels over an already dirty section.

Drilling The Well
I drilled the cleaning pad well 2 1/4" wide and 1/4" deep using a Forstner drill bit. Forstner bits create a flat bottom hole, which was necessary for the pad to sit level in. These drill bits come in 1/8" increments, I found the 2" and the 2 1/8" sizes both to be just a little too small as once these pads get wet with the alcohol, the expand out between 1/8" and 1/4" in diameter. If the pad swells too much, it will compress against the sides of the hole and buckle up in the center... this makes rolling the locos over it difficult, and the cleaning results uneven. Also, since these pads do vary slightly in size, a 2 1/4" hole seemed a safe size, as I haven't encountered any pads this large. Once damp with cleaning solution, the pad will stay put against the rails.

I used a small piece of maple for the base and after cutting the hole, gave it a quick coat of polyurethane to minimize alcohol absorption from the cleaning pads. The track was attached to the maple with a fast setting 2 part epoxy. I also applied a small amount of the 2 part epoxy between the rails and the ties to prevent the rails from slipping out of their base. The rails at the cleaning pad end were filed down to give them a smooth, tapered shape. This will prevent any possible scratching of the wheels by the sharp ends of the rails when moving the loco back and forth. For powering the rail section, I purchased a package of electrical leads with attached alligator clips on both ends from Radio Shack, then stripped the alligator clips off of one end and soldered the wires to the end of the rails. You can attach the remaining alligator clip to either the rails of your layout or the terminal screws of your transformer during cleaning.

The cleaning pads I use are marketed in New York under the name "Upstage, Foam Make Up Pads", part #88312. They come 10 per package, and cost $1.59. They are approximately 2" round and 3/8" thick, and they conform very well to the profile of the wheels being cleaned. Overall, this is a nice addition to have around your layout... it's simple to build, uses readily available cleaning pads, and goes a long way to keeping your locomotive's wheels clean and bright.

May 4, 2008

TimeCast, Historic Miniatures

TimeCast of Shrewsbury, England produces a series of dedicated Z scale, as well as many 6mm, historically accurate European and North American structures that are reasonably priced... and very good.

The thumbnail photo above is actually one of their 6mm scenes with a Marklin box car in the photo for reference. Looks good from here!.

From the Napoleonic era to the fields of Gettysburg to WWII era Germany... TimeCast covers quite a lot of ground.

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