G`day Folks, Some of you may remember some years back, a magazine was published promising you that you could build a model railway with parts and pieces that came with each edition. The first edition entered the market at a considerably reduced price and was complete with a Mk1 coach as well. In Australia the first edition was $ 8.00 for the magazine and the coach. It seemed worth a punt to me so I bought 5 first editions, ditched the magazines and kept the coaches. The coaches, as pictured below, were of inferior quality, however made up into a rake of 5, looked quite OK trundling around my layout. It soon became obvious that these coaches were not free wheeling at all. The rolling resistance was high, and compared to a Hornby or Bachmaan equivalent, they were quite inferior. However, at 8 bucks a throw, they were full of potential, especially when one was trying to increase numbers of coach trains on ones layout. I decide to have a crack at improving the rolling resistance by turning down the points on the ends of the axles. This certainly improved the coaches but was still unsatisfactory for me. So I just parked them in the to do basket and felt that I would get around to solving the problem one day. I eventually bit the bullet and decided to convert them over to Bachmaan bogies. The Bachmaans are just under 15 bucks a pair at my local model shop, and if one adds the original 8 bucks purchase price, 23 bucks for a free wheeling coach that can be tarted up to look nearly as good as 50 bucks worth of coach, is still a viable proposition. The Bachmaan bogies have a nice little recess built in underneath the bogies that will accept a 3mm washer quite nicely. So it`s quite easy to Superglue a washer in place and center it reasonably well The thing is though, this 3mm hardware could be used across a range of older models too, therefore offering a fairly easy solution to adding new bogies to them. Anyway, we have a video below to briefly cover how it`s done. Gormo
G`day Folks, One of my YouTube subscribers pointed out that the retro-fitted coach bogies work fine when pulling, but what about when pushing.? So I did another video showing how they perform through a couple of tricky point configurations whilst being pushed. Gormo
