Thanks everybody. There are traction tires on the #1 and #2 drivers on the left side. When I turned down the flanges I made sure to carefully shave the tire surfaces to make sure they were in round. I put two 10g slugs of tungsten in the boiler shell also to provide weight. It pulls very well. With the fly wheel and the boiler mass it coasts over three inches if I run it light at about 60 N scale MPH and cut the power. That is on analog without a decoder.
Hey, new trainboard member here. This is my idea for an n scale tenwheeler: why not bash the bachmann connie? here is a diagram I drew up for making a t-31 or a c-9 from the spectrum 2-8-0, the latter of which can be seen on my San Diego & Arizona Eastern layout by the scratchbuilt Jacumba depot I built last month.
Russ: A question, could you go back through how you redid the boiler & domes? I'd like to add a saddletank to an HO engine, (and at that one that never had a saddletank) and am wondering if this migh twork.
That looks like a fun project. The challenging part would be shortening the chassis to eliminate one set of drivers. Probably be easiest to remove the front driver and move the cylinders and pilot back.
The boiler is made up of some parts I salvaged from other shells, some parts are resin copies I made of parts from other shells and a large section of the boiler is a piece of Plastruct tubing that I first turned on my lathe to get the proper taper and boiler bands. I then cut away the bottom so it would fit over the chassis. If you can't find a saddle tank from another model that can be modified to fit over the boiler shell you are working with, then you may have to fabricate one somehow from scratch.
Great build. I really like the tender work. Those are great tenders but the pickup is horrible and often hurts the models. You have inspired me.
I agree, MP tenders are a must for SP steam, but they need a bit of work right out of the box. My method of fixing pickup is just to use bachmann's 2-8-0 tender trucks. That way you can reuse the bachmann electrical drawbar and I just soldered black flexible wires from the pickups on the front truck to the pickups on the rear truck. That way I can have all-wheel pickup that is easily accessible/easy to remove the trucks for repairs, plus they just look like inconspicuous connecting hoses or somethin' under the tender: KIT-bash-eeng (n.): our clever ways to take the few generic models we have and model anything we want. However, an as-616 in SP livery would be appreciated. Would keep me from butchering an Atlas rsd-4/5!:tb-biggrin:
Yikes. Impressive work. Had to rub my eyes and blink a couple of times. Is this an N scale forum? You don't always see that kind of craftsmanship in that other scale. Please add some words about turning down the flanges. Seems like getting that right (especially in N scale) is critical. And quartering the drivers?
I pulled apart each driver set leaving the gears pressed on the axles. I mounted one of the axles in my moto-tool with the long part of the shaft facing out. I pressed each driver onto the splined shaft one at a time and spun them to carefully cut down the flanges with a needle file. They become rather thick when you get them to the desired diameter so I removed a lot of material off the inside surface (facing the chassis) and rounded the sharp edges on both sides of the flang. I polished them with fine steel wool while spinning. After finishing all the drivers, I assembled the the axles and gears into their place on the chassis. I started on the side with all the gears and pressed on all the drivers so that the counterweights were all lined up in the same orientation, all at top dead center. Then I rolled the drive train until the counterweights were rotated 90° and verticle. I flipped the chassis over and pressed the other drivers into place all at top dead center. This provided the quartering. I checked the gauge and adjusted the wheels accordingly. When everything looked spot on, a applied a small drop of super glue to each axle/driver interface on the outside and hoped enough wicked into any gaps to prevent any shifting of the driver on the axle.
Russell, Thanks for posting a new photo to this thread and bringing it back to mind. I remember following this one before. I really like how this turned out. Adam
