Mike's Railroad Crossing Forum

I am getting around to checking these Teardrop bells and return them to good operating condition. Here is one that surprised me as it looked alright on the outside:



But everything was frozen solid, including the washer on the back door which was rust welded beyond the capabilities of any penetrating oil or heat!



Here is the rust laden inside and components in TERRIBLE shape. Luckily I have all the spare parts to make this bell like new again.



This gong would be ok ( inside will have some pitting) after some blasting, but I am going to throw it aside and use a spare from a donor "Teardrop"





While I love mechanical bells, I am starting to appreciate the electronic bells and their practical use and solution to the many things that can fail on mechanical bells. Pests are a big problem and once a bell is so old and rusted together, it would be hard to justify heating, oiling, breaking, welding, tapping, to get these darn critters out, they really can take over.



On a side note, I even noticed a defect with the pretty darn solid design of the Western Cullen Hayes electronic bell. While the casting is great and weatherproof, they need to install a rubber gasket around the speaker on the bottom. Dust can blow up and inside and collect on the top of the circuit board and possibly short it out. If you have one like that, make sure you have discharged any static from your body (touch a door knob) and use a soft brush to agitate the dust while running a shop-vac vacuum hose above.





As you can see, some heat was needed to salvage the clapper from the otherwise rust-welded and rotted assembly.

Stay tuned to continued work on these and it is going to take a little patience to get these bells into good shape.

Mike

Good idea on the fish paper insulation, I will have to try that. I have some real old stock cloth electric tape from my dad's electrical supplies that works quite well, its not to be confused with that double sided sticky cloth tape stuff, but I also have that. I am not saving these coils though because I do have a spare set.

A smoking teardrop... Not something you see everyday, that's for sure...

That bell has seen some better days. I do agree that electronic bells are better in the sense that they dont get all the pest and rust problems as mechanical bells, but mechanical bells are much cooler!

Looks like it was popular with the wasps!

I would have to imagine that a mechanical bell that is working properly and gets normal use would not have very much of a pest problem. The noise from the bell itself would drive most away I would assume.

I am betting a bell that looks like the one in the above pictures probably sat unused for many years... which made it a haven for rust and insects.

On a slightly off-topic post, I'm going to do something like that for my signals soon. Details West makes some nose locomotives for HO scale, but they could work as those kinds of bells that were mounted to masts of signals.

They have the "type 1" rainshield, so that they'll look like the WCH/WRRS/MI/FS, and so on.

Yeah, I don't ever recall hearng or seeing any bells that have nests in them. Lights for sure (the Viall Ave 1 crossing here in town often has them under the visors). I agree w/ the inactivity time period, plus, you'd think that nowadays they make mechanical bells so compact that there's no room for insects to nest inside them.

I have quite a few crossings on the site involving wasp nests on the site. Some under the visors, and some that have gotten in the lenses. I guess the signals aren't active enough, or not active at all to generate the heat to get them out.

Gotta wonder if signal maintainers keep a can or two of bee spray handy should they come across a nest...