OK, I'll now let you in on one of my secrets. Several years ago I discovered RLW, and bought on a hunch the photoetched brass Nn3 tender sheets. JUST LOOK at this stuff! Rivits! Beads! Multiples! So for small steam like my little guys - Shays up to this project - you can cut and fit and solder this stuff up. The center one looks awfully close to what I need to expiriment with.... just used the scissors to cut it out.... More trimming and bending...and trimming and bending.... first test shot: Now, that looks pretty good for a first test. Call it a night. Oh, and I also filed off .020 from the bottom of the cab, its not glued down so its tipped forward a bit, but it looks significantly better; i.e. lower than the steam dome.
Oh, one inexplicable thing on this sheet is the color - the diagonal 'band' is just what it looks like, a very clean brass stripe across an otherwise oxidized sheet. Makes no difference to me on what I'm doing, but it sure looks wierd.
Randy...she is looking awesome ! I know you arent near finished yet and its just a test fit. Not to nitpic...but...did you square off the back corners? The Proto photo shows them rounded off. Even the front corners look to be rounded. Just sayin.:tb-wink:
SWEET!!!!!!! Something you might think to add is a small Builders Plate that shows you as the builder and date built. :thumbs_up: :thumbs_up: :thumbs_up: :thumbs_up:
On the corners.... The front is curled around more or less in the same radius as the Nn3 top sheet, just doesn't show that in the picture. I've bent the rear around so it's probably about 3" radius and that the width is my 9'6" as per the cab. Doesn't show well. The funny part about that prototype photo is from that angle it looks really rounded from the back, but if you look at the bottom frame edge there's still maybe only a 2" overhang over the frame. Still studying that. If anything, its next to impossible to get that brass sheet to bend to a truly sharp edge, it wants very much to radius bend.
Randgust, this is fantastic! And I really like the step-by-step walkthrough of the design/build process. Question: You mentioned it was really hard to do the curved cab body/roof in styrene. Why did you use styrene vs. brass or another metal? I'm pretty clueless, and you're something of an expert, so I'm really curious about the whys/wherefores of your materials selection there. Thanks!!
I used to work exclusively in just styrene; easy to cut, easy to glue, etc. There is a lot of really nice Evergreen strip material out there - I used both .010 x .020 and .020 square for the windows. Sheet material is easy to cut; score and snap, glue up with solvent. I'll also build up big thick chunks of it and file it to shape (that's the way most of my loco cab roofs have been done, just with a .010 wrapper on the top). Also like styrene for diesel parts with compound and rounded curves, much better than brass. When I have rivits, like the tender, I lean toward photoetched if I can find it. Welded steel works fine with styrene. I like brass tube for boilers for the weight, and also because I can pour type 160 metal in them to weight them up. I'll only solder brass for structural reasons. Epoxy comes in second, ACC last because it is too brittle. I really thought about brass for the cab on this one. Chris333 could probably draw and photoetch it in an evening, for me it would be a six-month project. But the real bugaboo for me is cab windows. I can cut styene really accurately, build up multiple levels, and get the openings right. With brass, getting many openings cut and filed is just a nightmare. Styrene can be filed to shape so easily. So you'll see me hybrid each piece based upon what I have to do with it, how structural it is, and how hard it would be to make in metal. On this project, just getting the running boards in .010 brass was a nightmare. I had to make a set of jigs, set them up on a wood block, solder everthing, then solder the running board assembly to the boiler, then cut all the cross-supports back out. But .010 styrene for running boards just is too fragile based on experience. I really admire guys that can do it all in brass, I still can't. Styrene has its own problems. If you laminate it up, it wants to warp. I've discovered that ACC'ing laminated sheets prevents that. So I excessively reinforce, go easy on the solvent glue, and then hit it again with ACC. But I do have styrene models that I made 30+ years ago that have held up OK, the material doesn't brittle out too much. I've also learned that if you have a choice of using thicker material where it doesn't show, use it. Both my 28-ton Shay and the 30-ton Climax were equal hybrids in material built the same way; brass tube boiler, styrene cabs, cast metal details.
Well, this project came to a screaming halt a couple months ago and I quit posting. I decided to MAKE SURE that it wasn't just running OK on the bench and the wide-curve ATSF layout, but running well on the original HV module, which was buried under several inches of molding parts, boxes, shipments, etc. I wanted to finish it without extensive layout testing but I knew better. Once I got that resolved and cleared it was apparent that I had a long way to go with this idea on the logging module. It was noisy (buzzy), bound up on the curves, and literally 'hammered' going uphill pulling a train, sounding like the rod brasses were worn. Basically, put a train on it and pull it uphill and it was completely unsuitable. As in 'don't bother finishing this mess'. So going over everything with a fine-tooth comb..... Front Z coupler won't work - binds the pilot truck. #1 driver right side not cocentric, visibly out of round Traction tires lumpy Curve binding due to wide gauge on tires Universal drive binding on tender A distinct 'clicking' out of one crosshead area. But what really got me was that the torque on the Faulhaber motor wasn't anywhere near as good as it should be. I was really 'putting the power' to it coming uphill and it was still struggling at full-slip, mostly because this thing is HEAVY, and with traction tires it won't slip easily at all. The worst part was that even after all this work, the old 25-year old Rapido 2-6-0 rebuild was quieter, slower, more powerful than this. Thoroughly disgusted. This was 'supposed' to be a quantum leap forward. Took me two weeks to calm down to the point where I started thinking rationally again. And started tearing stuff apart and redoing it, admitting to the obvious problems here. Now mind you, tearing this mechanism down to basic parts is not for the faint of heart. The rods, cylinders, crossheads, washers, everything is really tiny, easy to loose, and not something to mess with unless you're mentally prepared to spend hours searching for one dropped part. Yoga might help. The driveline stuff was really problematic, particuarly the non-cocentric wheel. It wasn't on the axle straight, and checking with the micrometer proved it. I was able to bend it around with pliers and get it right. That helped, and I also set the wheels to 'narrow' on the wheel gauges so it didn't bind so much on the curves. "rotated' the traction tires and that seemed to help. The clicking came off a molding edge on the crosshead guide, almost an imperceptible molding edge error, easily trimmed off. But I finally decided to try, one more time, on a gearhead-motor combination. I put the Gizmozone 5.14:1 on the Kato 12v 11-105 critter motor and tried it again. Originally, it just vibrated way too much. Now, with the tender weights stabilizing the frame, it's OK, and I also spent a lot more time getting the universal just right. It's still slow, but watching it pull a train on the HV layout it looks fine creeping around at about 20mph. And with a gearhead, the power is steady and smooth - you can basically just set the throttle and it has a constant speed - no tinkering - up and down the 4.5% grades pulling five cars. When it slips, you don't even hear RPM's drop, and the motor runs cool. Photos to follow. The only reason for posting this is to encourage those that think this stuff must come easy after 30+ years in N. Well, the veterans are just as capable of producing the failed project as anybody else, having to tear it apart and basically start over. Sigh. And people wonder why I don't offer this as a kit....
OK, well, after a week of testing this thing, fixing it, and finally deciding it's a "go" again, here is what it looks like: That's the Kato 12v 11-105 motor on the 5.14:1 Gizmozone gearhead. The 'frame' area is now on the tender and I think you can also see the curvature of the wrapper. The cab isn't attached still, so it's tipped a bit. It's running pretty well now. I really should do a video.
OK, here's the video of the mechanism running on the HV: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcLQlAkgHRE This shows it from complete creep up to about wide-open, and as you can see, the speed range with that motor and gearhead is pretty good. Now I'm satisfied with the performance.
Chris, you can run, but you can't hide..... not even on the west coast on Jerry's layout! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJmjd_uMdS0&feature=related So what was the gearhead on your Faulhaber....4:1? For those outsiders that don't know - Chris built that, and the photos of how he got the universal and worm into the Atlas mechanism were copied exactly on HVRR 5, so his DNA runs in my project just as deep.
It will be a bit before painting. I'll now be going through all the detailing steps I do, including castings, wire details, etc. I'll be throwing everything I do at this one. I kind of approach this from 'fragility' order; the most difficult to put on and the toughest details go on first, and the easy/fragile stuff goes on last. Anything that actually potentially interferes with the mechanism or tracking that might need adjusting comes next. Things like the bell casting go on at the very end. I did the front tender steps last night, which have very tight clearances for both loco clearance and truck swing. I got some cast metal GHQ tender steps and motified those, worked great, but now I seem to have developed an intermittent short on tight curves, not sure where that's coming from, and that's why you do it in this order.
OK, here's what I've done since the last posts: - finished all detailing - wire details, castings, handrails, etc. - mounted the cab and painted the interior green - painted the frame and running gear of the locomotive and tender - tested EVERYTHING one more time - things like the tender steps looked dicey on the curves. It can still negotiate 7 1/2" radius even with the close coupling of the tender and loco. So here's the pre-paint views. In taking these photos, I realized I'd forgotten to do two more things - fix the gap around the cylinder saddle and boiler, and put on the whistle! Both those are done now.
Wow....beautiful work! Cant wait to see it painted. I'll say it again.....N Scale is perfect for these type of locomotives.
