Keep those great Homemade cars a coming. I have really enjoyed seeing them and knowing other OGR members like making them and saving money.
Here are some of details of my Homemade Centerline Track Cleaning Car, a $3 to $4 version of the brass Centerline, O gauge track cleaning car and it works super.
The price of the Centerline Track Cleaning Cars is quite high listing for $133 plus postage. It is made from brass. The brass Centerline car is a work of art and not required to do a mundane job like cleaning O gauge track. I like the cars design as it has no pads to glue on to replace and no pad motor like the Lionel model.
I worked from a picture of the Centerline track cleaning car and made a body out of wood. The heavy weight of the brass for Centerline is not needed to clean the track as the roller brush rolls freely in the center of the car. The center pit of my wooden version was lined with aluminum flashing and glued it in with epoxy. This area gets wet from the cleaning solution and that would attack the paint and wood of the body.
I used 1 inch diameter mini paint rollers for the cleaning brushes and cut them 1/8 inch of less than the width of the pit (the rollers were the only out of pocket money spent). Pit is 2 7/16 in wide, 2 7/16 in long and 1 5/8 in deep using a part of 1 in diameter paint roller 2 5/16 in long. I used a short piece of ½ inch pipe coupling as weight inside the cleaning brush.
Rubbing alcohol is normally used the cleaning solution. Two or three extra dry cleaning brushes are used after the alcohol saturated cleaning brush and run until the all the wet solution is removed from the track and the dry cleaning brushes show little of the dirty picked up cleaning solution.
The dirty cut off mini paint rollers can be washed in the home washing machine by placing them in a small nylon net bag used for washing small items.
Below is Track Cleaning Car, cleaning roller brush and 1/2 in dia pipe coupling used as weight inside roller when cleaning
Charlie
