by RichD » Mon Dec 17, 2018 8:41 am
When you spoke of cleaning the track I suppose that you mostly meant cleaning the rails. By the way dielectric means insulating. The value of dieletric grease is that it keeps the electrical contacts between the track sections from corroding. Regular plastic tracks have a lot of joints and each one of those is a potential source of trouble. Even if each joint is nearly perfect after you add up the voltage drop across a few dozen of them you can have significant loss. Since your track was treated the connections may be free of corrosion and only cleaning to remove excess grease might be needed. If it was me I would check to see if the joints needed cleaning. I would do that by connecting all of the track sections, they don't have to make an actual layout. Track should only be connected to one side of the power strip. I would put a car with the rear axle assembly removed on the last section to act as a load and punch the controller for that lane. I would the measure the voltage at the power strip and at the last section. If the voltage on the last section was within a volt of the voltage at the power section I would be good to go. If the voltage drop was excessive then cleaning of the contacts would be necessary. I would never use anything with water in it to clean the track. For a start a water based cleaner would not be very effective in removing the dielectric grease, which is likely to be silicone based. I would use a plastic safe electrical contact cleaner on the joints first. A Dremel with a wire brush will do a good job of removing corrosion from the exposed contacts, but it won't be able to do the others. The other half of each joint will have to be polished with fine sand paper. Once the joints were cleaned I could apply dielectric grease before the sections were assembled in their final configuration, however since I never use water on a track the grease would probably not be necessary. I avoid using water because water promotes rust. If you use a minimal amount of spray surface cleaner on the track when it is not too humid and wipe that off promptly you would not be likely to have corrosion problems, but why take a chance on that? If your track is in a dry location you would have less problems with corrosion. I have a dehumidifier in my basement.
If you want to clean the surface of the track the best thing to use is WD-40. Do not spray WD-40 directly on the track, spray some on a rag and wipe down the track with that. The WD-40 will remove grease, oil and dust leaving the track looking like new, it also contains a rust inhibitor. You will probably need to polish the track rails from time to time, avoid using a coarse sandpaper, that will scratch up the rails and a scratched surface will corrode faster. I use foam fingernail buffing blocks from the cosmetic section of a drug store or from a beauty supply store. If you use your track a lot it the rails will not need cleaning very often, you tend to have more of a problem with a track that stands idle for long periods of time.