The Samhongsa gas electric combine Neil Carleton bought needed gear replacements.
By Neil Carleton
This article originally appeared in The Lantern, the official publication of the WMRC.
I bought a brass Samhongsa gas electric combine from the estate of Morgan Turney. It was sold as “needing work” but it was such a well made model that I had to buy it. On the track it would go about 3 inches and stop, when reversed, 3 inches back.
The model has one powered truck with a universal connected to the motor. When disconnected the motor ran smoothly with no issues. On removal of the bottom cover plate and opening the gear tower I found three plastic gears meshing to brass gears. On close inspection, all three were cracked, and they jammed when the crack rolled around. The gears are quite small and two different sized axels.
NorthWest Shortline has hundreds of replacement gears and some they recommended, but would not let me send the damaged ones to make sure. Each new gear was over US$30 and not easily returnable. A friend who is not an active model railroader wondered if 3-D printing was a solution.
I contacted Darrell Brownlee, who has printed some vehicles and some other items for me. He said he knew what to do, so I got the cracked gears to him. In short order he returned new gears, with lots of spares. I fit them in and they worked!
Then I realized I could not tighten the gear tower sufficiently to remove some gear slop when going forward, causing excess noise.
It appeared that the machine screws were bottoming out so I spoke to Darrell and with the measurements I sent him, he was able to print extremely small washers. The washers were various thicknesses but the winner was two about the thickness of paper.
Gas electric now runs smoothly in both directions. Next step is to add DCC and then paint and decal the model.
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