Axle Straightening

[wrmcclellan]

A good firend of mine was displaying his Modern era Lionel Texas Special Set at a local train show a few weekends ago. An unfortunate accidental uncoupling of cars caused the Station Sounds Diner car to plunge to the floor.

This fall of about 36 inches mangled one of the trucks. Luckily nothing else was seriously harmed. I took the unit home to repair it for my friend.

With some careful work, I was able to straighten out the internal sheet metal axle frame assembly, but I had one axle that was seriously bent right at the point of where axle enters the rear of the sintered iron wheel. The wheels on these Modern era cars are pressed onto the axles, so I could not simply remove the wheel and straigthen the axle separately. The axle in question also contains the magnet for the Hall Effect rotational sensor (to activate in-motion sound effects), and these magnets can be quite fragile. Thus I decided to try straightening the axle without having to press the wheel off.

I placed a couple of pieces of aluminum bar in the cross slide vise on my bench drill press and adjusted the vise to hold the AL strips at track gauge. I then chucked one of my large punches into the drill press and aligned the cross-slide vise to allow me to press on the axle as shown in the photo below.



This setup worked extremely well. After a few presses and eyeballing the axle assembly, I had the axle and wheel turning true again.

I also used the vise to reset the outer truck frame assembly to the right guage for the axles. I put some cardboard on the vise to protect the truck frames from scratches.



So the story has a good news outcome. I was able to reassemble the truck assembly, replace a light bulb that fractured upon impact, and the reassemble the diner car. After a reset and reprogramming the ENG ID code, then car looks and runs perfectly again. I tested it out behind my PW Texas Special F3 A/B set. Amazing about the color match between two items separated by over 40 years.



Regards,
Roy

[Anonymous]

Nice work and thanks for sharing the techniques.

Re the color matching, there was an article in one of the Detroit papers about Lionel at the time the PWC Series was being introduced. The Texas Special was featured and the company rep involved with the interview spoke about the issues of matching the paint with the original 1954 runs. These were done with auto lacquers. They had the DuPont numbers but current environmental concerns required use of a more earth friendly paint formulation. The production of the new engines was delayed several months to work out the paint issues. I have a set of both the original 1954 AB pairs and the PWC set. The colors are almost perfect match. I saw a set of the K-Line 18 inch cars at a train show today. This was a striking consist. It would be really nice if Lionel did an accurate TS AA set now that they are doing an E-7 set of loco's.