#kvb

Omega Radio for January 25, 2020; #218.

Essaie Pas “Retox”

Lust for Youth “Great Concerns”

Zanias “Follow The Body”

Azar Swan “Empire Grave”

Squadra Blanco (Legowelt) “The Night Must Fall (Night Of The Illumination)”

Broken English Club “Divinity”

Ancient Methods “Immured In Supreme Beliefs”

Canal Street Electronics (Michael Berdan) “Almost Human”

Salford Electronics “Deconstruction”

JK Flesh “Trinity”

History Of A Drowning Boy (Michael Berdan) “Of Our Own Making”

Girl Pusher “Out Of Breath”

Kanga “Honey”

Fatamorgana “Until”

Nation Unrest “Below”

TR/ST “Iris”

Vowws “Losing Myself In You” (f. Gary Numan)

DVA Damas “Out Of Thin Air”

Automatic “Damage”

Linea Aspera “Malarone”

KVB, The “In Deep”

Golden Filter, The “Autonomy”

White Ring “Shaken To Sleep”

Rosa Damask “How To Feed My Friends”

The KVB- Always Then (Post-Punk, Darkwave) Released: January 30, 2012 [Clan Destine Records] Producer(s): Nicholas Wood

Time for another model railroad project! The victim this time is this little Kato N-gauge tram:

Kato just calls these DUEWAG tram and reissues them every now and then with different liveries (this one features Cologne). Technically, they’re Aufbau- or Verbandwagen, two types that were built by a number of companies in post-war Germany, sometimes on the basis of older vehicles, sometimes new. Kato’s model is relatively cheap and based around their two-axle chassis that is also used in their pocket line trains, and it’s okay at best. No flywheel, old motor, just two wheels for power pickup, you can’t really expect much here.

Recently, Kato introduced a completely redesigned version of this chassis, with a tiny coreless motor with a flywheel. The difference is night and day: These new trains run perfectly even at low speed and are incredibly quiet and smooth. Kato sells replacement chassis, and if you have any pocket line train from them, you should really consider buying it, even if DCC installation is a big hassle there.

Sadly they don’t sell a tram version of the replacement chassis yet (they do sell exactly one tram with the new chassis), and since all the plastic parts were completely redesigned, you can’t fit the new mechanics into the old chassis.

So I decided to convert this to a coreless motor myself. A coreless motor is a DC electric motor where the spinning part does not contain an iron core, which decreases weight and undesirable magnetic effects. They used to be very expensive to manufacture, and you could only find them in the most expensive model trains, or in super-expensive conversion kits. A motor by brands such as Faulhaber or Maxon can easily cost 50-100€.

But these days, you can also find really cheap tiny coreless motors for like 20€ or less. I’m certain they’re not as good as the brand name ones, but they’re much more attractive. I bought mine from micromotor.eu (via a big green retailer), but there are plenty of other sites available as well.

Here’s the old motor, surrounded by the new motor, shaft extension/adapter and worm gears:

There’s notably no flywheel here; the tiniest motor they sell with shafts on both end, like the original, is the 0816D, which stands for 8 mm diameter, 16 mm length (both approximately) and dual outputs, and that makes it as long as the original. There’s no space for a flywheel, sadly.

To fit the motor into the train, I designed an adapter that would give it the right size, and then 3D printed it (not myself, I use Shapeways for that).

I stole that idea from micromotor.eu, which sell kits with such adapters for many different types of trains, but sadly not this one (yet). The motor is glued into the adapter with superglue, through the hole in the adapter. It needs to be wired up manually, but since I’m running DCC, that’s literally no change; I just added some longer leads here.

And here it’s in the chassis:

So, how does it all work? Well, I’d show you, but apparently I can’t insert a video in the middle of a post and I’m not changing the post type now and loosing all formatting. What I can tell you is that it runs at all, which makes me happy.

The downside is that I don’t have the relative positioning between the cogs on the wheels and the worm gears perfect, so the result is that it can be loud at times (and that is after putting a lot of cardboard shims in there). Also, the lack of flywheel is really noticeable. Power pickup remains as poor as ever, and the tram remains very sensitive to dirt on the track.

heumarkt station // köln altstadt

architect: ulrich coersmeier