I'm in the process of changing the plastic wheels on some of my older rolling stock over to metal one's, the metal one's that I've got are only insulated on one side as shown in the pictures that I've attached and was wondering if these are ok? I'm running on DC if that makes any difference
Yes they are perfectly OK. Having one side live to the axle is very useful if you want to fit pickups, or resistors for occupnacy detection when using automation software.
Some makes isolate one side. Others isolate both. Does not matter as long as one side is isolated. I have wheels that are not isolated for 3-rail use, which are the only wheels to avoid if running on 2-rail other than wheels with flanges too deep (Or two shallow) for ones desired use. (Too shallow a profile can also give issues depending on the track one wants to use).
But generally, single sided or both sided isolated wheels are not a problem. Single sided isolation can help if one wants to use the axles as useful current collection points... Other than that, either will do fine!
Aswell as the uses mentioned in 1 of the above posts, I have used metal wheels of both types ( insulated both sides and /or isolated on 1 side ) on a parcels coach to assist a loco's tender pickups with powering the motor.
This has had the benefit of reducing or completely negating the need to clean the loco's driving wheels as they no longer collect power as the pickups had been removed from the loco itself having worn out less than a year after the loco's were purchased.
I had it happen on 1 of the 1st black 5s that hornby introduced in the super detail variation back in the early 2000s I believe it was. I purchased my loco and gave it a good run every day back in 2005 and in that time it managed to get the loco pickups mangled in the driving wheels on both sides which resulted in it's 1st attention that it needed.
I did manage to get the pickups back to something close to what they were but it was not easy to do by any means. Then the loco suffered a balance issue resulting in a spare tender drive weight being fitted in the cab to try and balance the loco, not much luck with the tender drive weight so I managed to get hold of some old roofing lead from my dad which he said would give the loco some good weight for traction and he was absolutely spot on, balance was restored and the black 5 was able to haul upto around 30 wagons ( 4 wheelers ) including a brake van which it was able to do until around march 2006 when while running the loco I heard an odd sound which I traced to the loco's driving wheels, more attention to repairs and I found that the pickups were no longer making contact with the wheels at all. I couldn't move the pickup strips either way to make them contact the tyres and my only option was to remove them. The loco continued in service until around April 2007 when the motor gave out and forced the loco's early retirement aswell as a rivet popping out of 1 of the coupling rods which narrowly missed going into my left eye and literally from April 2007 to November last year the super detail chassis had sat out of use. It was rebuilt with new wheels, coupling rods, valve gear and motor aswell as my own homemade pickups and does run but still needs some fine tuning to iron out the outstanding issues.
In line with the topic though, I am looking to doing another parcels coach or GUV vehicle with pickups to assist the black 5 with power collection and hopefully that will improve the loco's performance aswell as extra weight.
that is indeed good to know 