One of the things that I have struggled with is a concept to keep the contact shoe of the pantograph flat against the overhead wire.
For some reason I have avoided the obvious: Do it like the prototype!
The prototype uses four springs and two vertical levers to keep the shoe in place.
I think the reason for ignoring this was the problem with obtaining reall small springs. And again, i missed the obious solution. Sommerfeldt is probably the largest manufacturer of pantographs in all major modelling scales, and when I finally checked their spare parts list, I found springs with a diameter of 1 mm and length of 5mm. But they were a horror to work with, countless times there was a little *ping* and the little bugger flew across the room .
Things started to click, and last night I built a prototype for the centering mechanism. It was a lot of trial and error before arriving at a working solution, so there are a few traces from failed attempts:
And that in fact concludes the work on the pantograph!
With the prototype done, I can move on to the *real* ones...
Regards,
Haavard
