Before I proceed I should mention if you do not have a lot of patients do not even attempt to build
one of these engines it took me all up about 2 1/2 hours just to fit the wheels
I will also repeat at this point what the lovely lady Chris from roundhouse said to me when I
purchased the kit over the phone. 'You should not have any problems as long as you follow the instructions.'
You need to read the instructions find the components, lay them out how you think they should go
and then read the instructions again.
I very nearly fitted the outside cranks with pins to the wrong set of wheels as I forgot to check
which was the back end of the loco.
To fit the wheels you slide the axle through one bush slide on both wheels onto the axle the fit the outside cranks to the axle and secure them with a screw, set the wheels to the required gauge 45mm or 32mm and lock the wheels in place with grub screws. Sounds easy doesn't it. Wrong..
The wheels are a very tight fit onto the axles, I guess to ensure the do not wobble but I found all
of the wheels too tight for me to put on and be able to adjust them to the correct position.
Two of the wheels just needed me to slide them up and down the axle 20 or 30 times while pushing
the end of the axle into a block of pine to free them up but the other 4 required me to wrap 800
wet and dry around a screw driver and then to slide the wheel over it and roll it back and forwards
across the table many times to ream out the fraction of a millimeter required to fit them.
Once the wheels are on the axles you need to fit the outside cranks.
The instructions recommends using a G clamp to fit these as they are a very tight fit. I found this
only moderately successful. It was a good way to get them mostly on but found I had to finish with
my rubber mallet from my jewelry making toolbox to get them to sit square.
So after 2 1/2 hours work this was the end result.
Here is the chassis getting it's first feel of track. I was a bit surprised and disappointed in that the flangeless wheels sit about 0.5mm off the track and even after pushing down on the frame they still did not make contact with the track. I'll need to make contact with Roundhouse to see if this is meant to happen or if my wheels were machined 1mm too small.
I emailed Roundhouse the next day and within 1 hour I got a response from them, thats not bad customer
service.
I was told that as this is an unsprung chassis that if the centre wheel was the same size it could cause
rocking of the train from front to back wheels making it easier to derail. The centre wheel was
made unflanged as this enabled it to go around tighter turns.
I was very pleased to here that as I was worried I might need to have the frame replaced which
would of destroyed hours of work.