grooves in axles?

[agc]

I was wondering if cutting the grooves in the axles really does help? I have seen axles with four grooves cut in them - Are better? Is cutting the grooves worth it? or is there another secrect to grooves or designs of grooves in axles?

[agc]

oh yeah orgot to add this. We polished the wheel bores with a pipe cleaner in a drill on low speed and used bore cleaner and used another pipecleaner with grafite. I counted to ten on each process. The axles got a little smaller after we polished them. Not much but the spinning the wheels by and wobbling started after that, but only on two of the them. So I guess you can polish too much? But we counted to ten on each step of sandpaper. We stared with 400 grit and ended with 3000 grit We used a drill press on the slowest speed to polish them. How do you guys polish your axles? Did we polish too much and created the wobble?

[rocketpine21]

From my experience the grooved axles are faster in certain situations. For example....Grooved bsa axles insided bsa wheels provide a lot of slop in the bore to axle contact. This was an issue with railriding as the DFW seemed to "catch" or "skip" as it tries to moved along the axle. In the rears it seems fine but the front was problematic. The grooved axles seemed to work much better with awana wheels as the bore seems to be smaller (i havent measured however). Some mention that awana axles fit really nice in bsa wheels. So I think there is a advantage when you have them matched up with the right wheel.