Brake gear.

A problem with all systems where power is picked up from the rails is that brake shoes realistically close to the wheel treads need to be isolated from those on the other side and from the frames, or else short circuits will occur. DC or DCC, I think. Now my system is going to have no pickups from the driving wheels, but the brakeshoes as made in the kit will short-circuit from one side to the other. What options do I have?

My first thought was to make new brake hangers by acrylic/epoxy molding. So I bought a Sylmasta kit and made molds for the brake hangers for the locomotive and tender.

I then made castings first in polyester (this was the plastic/resin provided in the molding kit):
These were too friable and brittle, however, so by default I tried molding in Araldite, which was more robust, but full of bubbles:

Even these looked unlikely to survive very long in general use, though. Contacting friends for advice suggested that I was trying to make castings of too much: it would be better to make castings of just the brake shoes.
However to do that meant filing all the brake shoes off the hangers (fourteen!) and both making and fitting accurate copies of the shoes onto each hanger. Then it occurred to me – I don’t need to take all the brake shoe off, just the surface which will be in contact with the wheel tread.
So I found some 2mm wide Plastikard strip, and have carefully filed sufficient off the surface of the brake shoes to glue a strip of Plastikard onto each shoe.

So the one on the left has been filed back, and the ones on the right show the Plastikard in place.

Once I came to try to fit them to the frames the next adjustment became necessary. As the frames are set at nearly the correct prototype width, they are much closer behind the wheels than in Finescale. If the brake hangers are fitted as made, the hangers are too far away from the frames, the shoes are outside the wheel rims and the outside parts of the shoes contact the coupling rods and stop them rotating. So now I became more grateful that the main parts of the brake hangers are metal, not epoxy! The two on the left of the picture above have had the posts from which the hangers are suspended shortened, whilst the right hand one is the original length. I think that this adjustment would have been near-impossible using plastic parts.

Now I just have to fit them, one or two at a time, and make sure the wheels still go round after each fitting.