The guy from San-Val offers these funky crane toys on feebay. Cheap enough, but awful garish, and 1/32… Also much too modern for my layout.
Then I saw this ancient Erie gas/pneumatic crane at the National Pike engine show down at Brownsville, Pa., and it got me thinking (dangerous, that)
First, the crawler base got new sideframe overlays.
I looked for a gas motor the right size… no dice. Then I found an inexpensive resin gen set sold by LarryGscale… which is almost a dead ringer for a Cat D-11000 power unit.
The crane baseplate, stripped of all that orangy mess, got coffee stirrer floorboards. and the gen set lost it’s dynamo. It’s just a bit TOO long, but we’ll live with it. If anybody asks, it was retrofitted after the original engine blew up.
Basswood framing, wood spools and plastic gears. Not near as complicated as it looks!
A bit of Plastruct tube for a horizontal muffler, a 5/8" spool and wheel peg air cleaner, and a 55gal drum (also turned wood) fuel tank. Ain’t we just FANCY?
Siding is good old coffee stirrers again. I made a ‘sheetmetal’ vent out of thin styrene on this side because the Cat’s radiator is REAL cozy with the framing. Wouldn’t want it to overheat, would we?
3/4 rear view showing the open access doors and re-installed counterweight from the toy crane. Ball/Erie units of this vintage were often green with black or grey trim. But I think the grey and barn red just looks snazzy.
I cheated on the roof. It’s a LGB Euro coach roof I got off evilbay shortened to fit and framed in with basswood. The exhaust pipe is some weird Lionel O-scale plastic thingy I found cheap at the LHS on a sprue with crates and barrels. I’ve got about 15 of the dumb things in my junk box now if anybody needs a couple.
Remember all that orange stuff I removed? The boom made it’s re-appearance, sporting some extra bracing, some Ozark pulleys, and a coat of satin black. The controls are wire with styrene tubing grips pressed on.
Doesn’t look too bad, does it?
The clamshell bucket was a project in itself. Luckily I had a metal one from a coin op candy crane in my junk box. The rest of it is wood, styrene, an Ozark pulley, and a little Jerry rigging on the supports in the form of steel wire clad with plastic angle. The plastic wasn’t strong enough by itself, and I didn’t want to spend all that time making 4 metal ones.
A proper clamshell rigging diagram, courtesy of the Department of War of all places. I’m waiting for the glue to dry on the drum end of the two cables before I can hang the bucket…
Should go rather well with the kitbashed Monogram Mack AC with manual cable dump that I built last winter, doncha think?
More pix another day
