Quartering...

Quartering has always been a real challenge for me. I don't think I've ever built a 009 loco which didn't have a slight limp. I was discussing it with a Well-Respected 2mm Finescale Modeller the other day and his comment was "you've just got to do it - the more you do, the easier it gets". This didn't encourage me. I've had problems in quartering Lancashire for a while, which explains how it's taken me several years to get this far with it. It's run erratically for a while, sometimes having a severe bind and sometimes being almost OK.

So I bit the bullet and built a quartering jig. The commercial ones are no use because they're not designed for outside frames and are mostly directed at 4mm finescale standard gauge, so I had to design something specifically for Backwoods kits with 2mm axles - I wanted it to be just right. The photo below shows what I came up with.

The two centre brass sections have a U-shaped recess milled in the top to hold the axles, and are set the the correct back-to-back by the brass bobbins in the centre. The side sections are 2mm mild steel and have a "L"-shaped cutout in the top to allow the crankpins to be set a to 90 degrees. They're spaced from the centre sections by different sized brass bobbins and the whole thing is kept together with two 2mm silver steel rods with the ends tapped 8BA. The two 3mm silver steel rods keep everything rigid (these are a reasonably tight pushfit into the uprights) - the top one needed a section filing off the top to clear the driving wheel flanges.

As it happens, when I checked the chassis the quartering was only slightly out and was easily corrected . A bigger problem was that one of the cranks wasn't at 90 degrees to the axle - this was replaced. Everything then ran beautifully until I replaced the gearbox and motor, when the bind returned.


At least I'd ruled out the quartering, so after a long period of head-scratching and examination of the running chassis under the jeweller's eyeglass, it transpired that the rear offside driver was slightly out of true with the axle, causing it to bind against the side of the gearbox. Fortunately there's enough play in the gearbox mounting holes to shift it sideways by about 0.5mm without affecting the mesh. Miracle of miracles! - a free-running chassis.