dismantling instructions, anybody?

I’ve found a badly-painted ‘project’ in the shed yesterday - the 1/20.3 Accucraft brass long caboose. I bought this one many moons ago for a third of its £600 UK price - the downside was the truly awful after-market paint job in DSB done by the previous owner using what may well have been a fence-paint brush. At the same time I had a real money-earning project ongoing, I thought. I’d been given another one, identical but somehow mysteriously factory unpainted, to finish off. Stan Cedarleaf had sent me a complete set of suitable decals for it in ALL possible running numbers. The upshot was that the owner died and his son collected the unpainted caboose off me, and I got left with the decals, already prepaid for, by me, I might add.

Now, fate has stepped in, and I can finally put them to use!!

Whooo-hooo!

So - anybody taken one of these things to pieces? Your advice is valued and appreciated - it looks, not to put too fine a point on it. a PITA.

Well Terry, if it’s brass it’s likely soldered in a lot of places. Placing it in a very hot oven fo a while will likely cause it to come apart.

Hope this helps.(https://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-undecided.gif)

Ah, right. I had bethought me of that, TTTT, but on the other paw, it does seem to be overly encumbered with innumerable teeny cross-head screws and bolts, and it occurred to me that there might be a sequence of undoing/removing them that might be less destructive. It might be the wrong colour, but it’s still a very fine model that I’d like to keep looking much the same as it does right now, but in a different scheme than DSB.

Thanks, anyhow. I knew I could rely on either you or Ken B to offer constructive advice, but on this occasion, it could well prove to be the exact opposite.

Take care, eh?

Terry, my dear friend; even though we spent a good time chatting on the telephone, we never touched on removing paint on that chariot.

I suggest that you try to separate it into at least wo major parts. The base, or everything below the sides, and the rest above. This of course is done after removing the trucks (Bogies), couplers, and other screw connected parts.

After that, since it is brass, you can attack the paint with a number of paint removers, using an old tooth brush, or a miniature, fine wire brush. The paint remover can be lacquer thinner, or whatever makes a dent in the paint, even Acetone…remember, the car is not made of plastic.

Of course if there are any plastic parts on it, such as widows; they should be removed first.

Painting much of the stripped car, can best be done while it is disassembled.

I hope these suggestions help. If not, hit me hard when next we chat, or cut off completely my SM Whisky supply…!!!

Fred Mills

Accucraft vehicles have a very convoluted assembly method. best bet is to find the screws and remove till it comes apart. my Accucraft c-19 requires many screws be removed to separate the boiler from the frame. there was really no consideration of servicing these after the sale (typical Chinese mentality)

I used to have one but sold it off many years ago.

AL P.

Mornin’, Fred. Taking the trucks off is not a problem, even though they are wired in to the internal circuit for the marker lights. Even taking off the only non-metallic bits - the gladhand hoses - is not a problem, after all, I put them on when I got the model. It’s the sequence, if there is one, of many teeny screws underneath the body that obviously connect the underparts to the body proper that concerns me most.

I’m familiar with having to refinish models made of all kinds of materials, from brass to balsa wood, so that part of it is not a problem. I was just hoping that somebody here might have found themselves having to dismantle one of these rare and costy models, and then mantle it again so that it looks the same as it did before they began. Please feel free to say trucks - bogies hereabouts are what people in North America call ‘boogers’. I personally prefer the word ‘snoticles’.

Al Pomeroy said:

Accucraft vehicles have a very convoluted assembly method. best bet is to find the screws and remove till it comes apart. my Accucraft c-19 requires many screws be removed to separate the boiler from the frame. there was really no consideration of servicing these after the sale (typical Chinese mentality)

I used to have one but sold it off many years ago.

AL P.

Mornin’, Al, thanks for the call, and the reminder. About four years ago a visitor to our club/association track over at Ramsey Mereside picked up my Accucraft K-27 by putting his fingers underneath the headlamp and cab roof. The as he lifted it clear of the tracks, the headlamp came off and he dropped the whole thing. The amount of dismantling I had to undertake to get enough of the locomotive stripped so that I could literally place a long sash-cramp on the frames to straighten them out would make a long work of non-fiction. I swear that the thing had as many bits as the full-size loco.

Tac, all I can say is make sure you have good tools. Especially nut-drivers for those little M2 and M2.5 bolts.