I’ve reported in the past that I was having serious trouble with the Sellers turntable model, and getting it to rotate smoothly. Here’s what I’ve learned:

As built, the center of the turntable floats about 3/32" above the cast "pivot" bushing. All of the weight is carried by the little wheels at the end of the bridge. On my particular model, one of the wheels does not precisely track the ring rail (the other three wheels line up perfectly). This, coupled with the slight slop in the bushing, allowed the bridge to bind up when the turntable was "armstronged" around.

This evening, I fooled around with the thing a bit, and tried inserting some washers on the shaft between the cast bushing in the pit, and resin block in the center of the bridge. When I reached a thickness that raised the center just a hair above ring rail, suddenly, the turntable rotated super-smoothly! As I thought last May, a larger bearing surface in the center of the bridge does the deal. My task now is to find two nylon or Teflon washers exactly half thickness of the area I need to fill. Finally, I’ll add a collet on the bottom of the shaft to hold the bridge in place and apply just a little friction to the whole works. Ideally, I would like to use a pulley and another nylon bushing for that, to accommodate future motorized or hand-cranked operation. But, I’ll take what I can get.

Well, it’s Monday morning. Kimberton has passed. And, we survived…

In reality, things, I think, went really, really well. Especially well, when you consider that the modules present had never been connected together before. Two sets (mine and Charlie’s) had never even been to a public display before!

You can view pictures or a slide show from the weekend.

So, here’s where I get to brag a little. Using the IKEA Ivar shelving system for module supports worked perfectly. Setup was blazingly fast — I was in, up and leveled in a little over an hour! We had a great time running trains (at least I did), and if I’d had time to get the yard switcher built, the yard would have functioned exactly as it was planned to.  In any case, we were able to make-up trains, send them down the line, come back to the yard and break them down again. And, locos could be turned for the next trip.

David’s Bachmann-bash outside-frame 2-8-0 was a hit of the show, drawing comments from everyone who saw it. In this shot, it’s just coming off the bridge on his return-loop module set.

One issue that we did have was leveling at several of the module joints. While all of the joints on my modules worked very well, in a couple of cases, we’re going to have to go in and perform some surgery on the modules.

I ended up buying a lot of toys — more than I had really planned, actually. I picked up a few things specifically for the modules: A Banta Alna Center station kit, and some parts for the engine house. I also bought another one of those lovely Bachmann outside-frame 2-4-4 Forneys, as well as two throttles for my DCC system, and a really nice looking side-door caboose body to ride on a Bachmann caboose frame.

Last, but not least, there was a great laying-on of hands by the assembled baronship, and John (Unca Weigley) Weigel was anointed as the newest Rail Baron. John is now known as the Rail Baron of Green Boxes.

So, that’s the report for the weekend. Today, I get to clean up the basement some, and bring the modules back inside. I’ll begin the process of tying them into the layout over the next few days, and then get back to work on them — there’s still so much to do! Our next planned outing for the modules will be at the Great Scale Model Train Show in Timonium in October. By then, I should be well on my way to completing this module set, and have at least one of the 45° curve modules built. If everyone who committed to building one gets it done, along well as the other modules people are planning, we’ll have a really nice setup going.