Lil Big Hauler Bumble Bee Loco, adding Big Hauler pistons kitbash The only thing trainwise I got for Xmas this year was time, time to finally get around to modifying one of my LBH engines, I decided to start with the Bee version first, here are the results, Big Hauler (BH) pistons mounts cut and shaped to fit the slots from the stock piston mounts:
The stock BH pushrods were then cut down and mounted back onto the sliders with a micro nut and micro bolt and some very small washers between the moving parts, I locked the nut with a little tiny dab of CA. The trickiest part was fixing the pushrod to the wheel, I ended up searching for a long enough bolt that was just large enough to thread into wheel’s mounting hole for the plastic siderod locking pin. I used a styrene tube spacer to fill in the opening space in the pushrod. More pics to come, I have since added water feed lines to each side of the boiler, a more complete looking backhead, an air brake compressor pump and storage tanks, a new BH bell that luckly fit into the left over opening after I cut the bell off, link/pin couplers from and rear, and stirrups and grab bars to the tender. Certainly looks better, even if the pistons are a tad larger than I would have liked, but you use what you got. Will be doing the same treatment to the Saddletanker one of these days. PS you WILL need a Dremel or some sort of tool to do the cutting efficiently, it could be shaped with a razorsaw and xacto blades, but it would be tedious work.
