E94 Update

A while back I posted about some issues I had been having with my Fleischmann E94.  As you may recall my decoder on hand didn't fit.  What I didn't mention is that the E94 is just slightly taller than anything else I own, and it was getting stuck in one of my tunnels.  The rise from under the table had the top of the E94's pantograph hitting the plywood underneath my roundhouse building.  Because that structure is integrated with tracks, it's no simple job to list it out and cut a new bigger hole in the wood.

I had tried a fix earlier, using a course wood file and a Dremel tool to take a little wood away but to no avail.  Working from under the table was extremely awkward with the file, I just could not apply any force to it, and my sad little wireless Dremel was not up to the task.  I had a Dremel Stylus and found that it just didn't have the power to do more then scratch the wood.  Now, this being the only Dremel tool I owned, I assumed that this was what they were, and what they were was not very good.  I probably offered some detailed opinions on the subject because for Christmas my wife gave me a new Dremel, and this new one is good.

What a difference having the right tool makes!  This new Dremel made the job easy, I spent maybe 30 minutes on it, tops.  The only thing I had to be careful of was not setting the table on fire, because the sanding head never bogged down once.  The funny thing is I had considered replacing my old Dremel before but didn't think I needed a new one, because it was a pretty useless tool.  I thought a fractionally better one would be similarly useless, only slightly less so.  Well, I was wrong. This new one is many orders of magnitude better and I just wanted to share the experience with you all in case your find yourselves mired with bad tools.

My E94 now can traverse the whole of my layout.  I feel like I just got a new engine!