Latest progress on Percy – Since Percy was clearly missing some of his magnets, I looked around and lo and behold, I found some ¼” Neodymium disc magnets I had previously bought from either Lowe’s or Home Depot, with the intention of using them as chuff triggers. They looked perfect – a stack of 10 of them seemed to exactly fill out the empty length on the inside of the hollow axle (along with the original magnet slug), and they were certainly strong enough!
Much to my dismay they wouldn’t go more than about a ¼” into the hollow axle. It seems that my hollow brass axle was mushroomed out to 0.28”ID on each end for a distance of about a quarter inch due to the axle adapter having been pressed in. The rest of the axle interior measures about 0.23”ID. Brass gives it up easily!
I gave brief thought to drilling out the axle (all I have is a hand drill until after Christmas 
), but after checking both my drill bit and the magnet diameters, I found that my drill bit was around 0.003” smaller than the magnets! So without a “fatter” drill bit or smaller magnets, it stopped right there. I thought about doing it anyway, and just using my press to shove the magnets all the way in, but then I remembered the mid-centered worm gear surrounds the axle, and realized I wouldn’t be able to press” my way past that without breaking something – magnets, most likely.
So I left all the magnets out (Percy does have a decent size lead weight) and added RED Loctite 271 to the larger diameter end of the axle adapter and pushed it into the hollow axle. I then added Blue Loctite 242 to the skinny end of the axle adapter where the wheel mounts, put the whole thing in my press, got it quartered, and shoved it home. I checked for wheel wobble immediately, knowing I had around 10 min for the Loctite to set up. That’s when I noticed the wheel on the other end could be “wobbled” by hand also. So 24 hrs from now when the Loctite on one end is fully cured, I will remove the opposite wheel and repeat this process.
Lessons learned so far:
- Hollow brass tubes suck as an axle for those inclined to try their hand at repairing such things.
- If I ever have to do this job again I will either replace the axle/gear/wheel assembly with a new one, or (assuming this experiment is successful) will automatically pull both wheels for gluing and re-pressing.
- Thank goodness Lionel still offers the whole axle/wheel assembly for sale!
I suspect that the root cause of this failure may be that Percy was dropped or received a blow to his wheels. Even if it wasn't hard enough to instantly break something, the soft brass axle would bend on the ends providing the start of an eventual failure.
George
