Gallery – Universal joints (English captions)

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- Universal joints – very easy to repair! -

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This are the problematic parts - balls and jack sockets of universal joints especially if they are made from plastic but also metal.

Cracked balls or bad and too short tappet pins? This all is easy to replace by scratch-built metal parts!

The base - railing posts from the ship model building. Search such ones where the ball diameter fits the bushings!

Cut off the ends behind a pair of balls, drill the rope hole a bit smaller and press new bolts into the holes. The bolts should be a hard metal with a smooth surface. In all cases you should hammer down or press the new pins into the holes for a very solid fixing! Otherwise, the hole was too far (or pins too thin)!

If the length ought to not that what you need for your universal joint, divide the shaft with a saw and solder it together again using a well fitting metal tube. So you can shorten or lengthen your new shaft to each wished lenght.

Or another case where I needed a new ball joint. Machining a ship railing post again where I trimmed the pins as first and drilled the hole for the shaft in a second step.

Here is the new motor with the new ball joint ready for use. However this needs a bit of precision work because all axes must be exactly centered.

And what can you do with burst plastic bushings? I used my hand drill machine and prepared a seat for a metal ring with a file at the rear end of the bushing.

Prepare a metal ring (from a roughly matching metal tube) inside according to the diameter of the bushing ...

... so that you can slightly press up the metal ring on the seat of bushing and secure the ring by some drops of CA glue. The glue will press together the bushing with hardening of glue.

Still a little work for a good optical impression - smoothen the surface of the pressed-on ring and the bushing a little bit.

Now the repaired bushing (at the lower right) sits more tightly than the two unprocessed original bushings on the other shaft stumps! (A gear box from an OMI steam loco model.)

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