Wheelset Widening

A while back I bought a couple MTH 50' high cubes, with the TTX FBOX reporting marks.  These come as 3 rail, but MTH also sells a 2 railing kit for them that has a set of decent 2 rail trucks.  The cars are already pre-drilled for mounting Kadee couplers.  The conversion went pretty quickly and the cars were on the railroad in short order.

The first move of the next operating session was pulling them out of the interchange track where I had put them on the rails.  The first sign of trouble was some serious bouncing and clunking going over turnouts.  It didn't take long to figure out that the trouble was all the wheels were too narrow in gauge.

A tad narrow

The most annoying part of this was that I had to take the trucks off again, which requires removing the floor of the car since the screw goes down through the floor into the truck bolster.  Anyway, I got the trucks off and dismantled and started working on the wheelsets.  I couldn't seem to shift or rotate the wheels on the axle by hand, and I didn't want to use a puller and mess up the pointed axle tip, which serves as a bearing.

The solution I came up with is a crude but effective wheel gauge widener:

Widener - 2 side pieces, 2 wedges, 1 hammer

I cut a slot in 2 squares of 1/2"plywood, and a longer slot into 2 tapered pieces of pine I cut on the table saw.

Widener in use

Using it is simple.  Stand up the two squares and drop in the wheelset, slide the wedges in from the top and bottom until everything snugs up about in the middle.  Then CAREFULLY tap with the hammer.  Two or three light taps is enough to get the gauge dead on 6 out of 8 times.  The other 2 times I gave it an extra tap, and had to press them back together just a tad, which is also easy by moving the 2 squares to the outside of the wheel and lightly tapping.

The cars now go through all my trackwork with no problems.