Hi folks, those of you that watched my review of the Auscision Tait set
might remember that one of the issues I discussed was the design of the pantographs
and the way that they latch when they are lowered
it's a little bit fiddly to release them and it can actually be quite difficult to lower them and
fix them in the lowered position, and over time the little tabs that hold it in place can become a bit
bent and it can actually be really hard to keep the pantograph down. So I've come up with a little fix
to be able to easily raise and lower these pantographs by hand, which I think really
improves the functionality of the models and makes it easier to do more realistic types
of operation. So what I did was bought a bunch of these tiny 2x3mm magnets
off ebay and I've painted them black so that they look better once they're installed, and I've come
up with two different ways of using these to hold the pantograph down. I worked out one way for the
Tait cars which is extremely simple and easy to do, however that didn't work with the L class which
have a different design of pantograph. So I had to come up with a different technique for that
I'll show you both of these techniques and I'm sure one or the other will work on Auscision's other
products (being their various New South Wales electric products) as well
So I'm going to use an unpainted one here just to make it easier for you to see what I'm doing
You can see I'm moving into position right in the middle of the base of the pantograph there
and it sticks to that little mounting screw. And that's pretty much all you have to do right there
That metal bar just under the conductor sticks onto the top of the magnet. I haven't had to glue
it in place or anything like that it literally just sits right there and I've been running my
Tait set around for a while with these installed now and it hasn't fallen off or anything like that so
that is a really easy solution. Here's the black painted one (which is actually missing a bit of
black paint now) going on just as a demonstration. You might notice that I'm using a wooden skewer
to manipulate the magnet around, this is obviously really important because if you try and use metal
tools it will keep sticking to them and will be really hard to position. So there you go, by hand you
can just simply raise and lower the pantograph now and it sits there quite happily. I did find
that one of my Tait cars that mounting screw was slightly lower down than on the other one
now you could obviously open the car up and adjust the height of that, but that would be really annoying
I managed to solve the problem just by sticking a tiny piece of metal under the magnet to raise its
height by a fraction of a millimetre and that was actually enough to to solve that problem. Now with
the L class pantograph I couldn't do that exact same thing because the pantograph has two separate
conductors meaning that that mounting screw sits in between them
the other thing I found was that these conductors are actually made of aluminium (I think) so the
magnet doesn't even stick to them. So I had to come up with a slightly different solution here
now you can see at the edges of the pantograph there's these tiny metal tabs and that's what
in the original design holds the pantograph down. You can see here I'm going to twist it
to get it up. So as I say the top part of the pantograph is not magnetic
so I had to do something to make it stick to the magnets. You can see these tiny tabs on either side
I was able to get a tiny piece of steel and glue it to those little tabs. Just balanced on the
end of my finger there. And that gave me a little point for the magnets to attach to
now you may find you will need the wooden skewer to carefully separate that from your
finger because, you know it's not real modelling if you haven't glued the model to your finger right?
so once you've separated that you've got a little magnetic contact there. And then these tabs at the
base I found were almost the right height already to hold one of those little magnets underneath
so we'll bend it up very slightly, not too much because I still want to apply a bit of downward
pressure to hold the magnet in place. And then just using a pair of pliers I'm just going to
slide that magnet in under there, and again no glue or anything required it just sits there
and it's easy enough to adjust and it's easy to remove if you
change your mind about this modification. So just using that skewer to hold it in place
so then you need to do the same thing on the other side of the pantograph
and of course the L class has two pantographs so again both sides of the other pantograph
and then once you're sure the glue has dried on those little pieces of steel you'll find that
if you just manually push the pantograph down it will stick to those magnets and, job done!
So being able to lower the pantographs is great for, you know, when you stable your
train and you want it to look like it's properly stabled. It's also good for doing
spark transfers or recreating this 1980s railfan tour with a South Australian 930
pulling the Tait set. So yeah really easy little fix. If you find that that single
magnet modification for the Tait cars isn't enough to hold them down you could very well
do the same thing I did with the L class to a Tait car, it's still got those same tabs
so that may actually be a better long-term solution if you feel like doing it that way
Now obviously the magnets do disappear quite a bit when you paint them black, but they still
look a little bit odd if you look closely. But to be honest I'm not too worried about
that because this base area of the pantograph is not actually modelled
super accurately anyway, particularly on the Taits they haven't even blackened those springs so it's
really a functional part of the model and it's not 100% accurate in the first place so I really
don't feel that this compromises the integrity of the model at all. So I hope you found this useful
and if you have any questions about what I'm doing in the video please let me know, and if you've got
any better suggestions on how to do this, I'd also love to hear them. Thanks very much for watching!