It was the destruction of sandalwood forests that began the hunt for another profitable crop, which, of course, ultimately became sugar.
Anyway, guess what Kid-zilla and I found out today…
Yep. I bought the wrong idler gears. We found this out as we were trying to quarter the drive axels and just couldn’t seem to get things to engage. Oh, well, better to have found out before I made things worse. These new idlers will go into the spares bin.
Eric
Update:
Newer new gears are on hand. Saturday we will try again!
Eric
Update:
Kid-zilla and I took this project on…again!
I let him drop in the new gears so that I could teach him about quartering…a detail that has bedeviled me in the past!
We buttoned up the chassis…
Getting the stern of this thing closed up is a bearcat, as the various bus bars and wires can and will loop around each other. On the underside, the mechanisms that hold the trailing truck in place are also a bit squirrelly, and you need a extra hand to depress the piston that holds the truck against a glide plate.
The next step was to get the mechanical spaghetti of the rods in place. Kid-zilla mercifully wandered off as I did battle, messing up screws, washers, wheelsets, and everything else. Practice makes perfect, and I got lots of practice!
Finally, we took the chassis to the rails to give it a test:
Video: Testing the Chassis
Success!
All that was left to do was find the smokestack (Done!) and button Gustav up (Done!). Unfortutely, the snowplow that broke while transiting back from a previous repair broke a bit more. I could not hook Gustav up to his train, as the same screw that holds the plow in place also holds the steam chest together.
I’ll get a longer screw this week that will accommodate that washer, pass through the broken mounting bracket, and on into the steam chest cover.
Curiously, I found in my carefully labled tray a bunch of leftover screws, allegedly to hold something to the chassis.
Try as I might, I could not determine where they went. I even referred to the original manual, but with no luck. I am wondering if they are left over from some other repair.
The other thing the manual shed no light upon was where to place various washers. I gave a STAINZ a good hard look, and it seems that the LGB washers only go where metal rubs on metal, so that is what I did.
I put this point here as, like the screws, it helped drive home my big lesson learned: Get the Repairs Done! None of my careful boxing and labeling was 100%, as there was still some guesswork at the end.
I rewarded mysel later that evening by just watching trains as the sun went down…
Sometimes, I have to remind myself to do that!
And with that, I can cross a job off Triple O - 2023 Plans & Objectives. On to another project on that overly ambitious list!
Enjoy your weekend!
Eric & Kid-zilla
That image right there should be taken of all you locos.Same with an image of each step of opening them up. My father taught me back in the day to make a drawing as I took things apart. Didn’t need to be an artist rendition just something that I could understand even a list ( screw, washer, spacer, rod, washer, wheel ) Now we have a camera next to us 24/7 it seems so drawing isn’t necessary. But the info will still be there two months down the road when you put it back together. 
Dave, sound advice! Labeling my bit box was only a 75% solution. Time for me to enter the digital age…
Eric
