Large Scale Central

TFT&W No15

Other Scales O / On30
#1

Sometimes when your Mojo wanes, its good to look for inspiration somewhere else…in my case working in an unheated warehouse and not getting home from work til after dark in most cases is not inspiring me to work on largescale outdoors…this is whay I have On30 for, the Winter LargeScale.

So dusting things off, I found a conversion that I began several years ago and never completed, which is prolly a good thing. It started life as an HO scale 2-6-6-2 Logging mallet from Mantua courtesy of Gary Buchanan. I did some work to the chasis and built a new superstructure for it.

At the time I had completed the tender and even installed a DCC decoder in it, but flashing foreward it appears (from the melted wire and burnt plastic around the decoder) that the decoder was fried. I’ve decided to build a different tender anyways, and to replace the small silver motoer with a nice hefty NWSL unit. Note the clear tubing connecting the motor to the rear gearbox and the rear gearbox to the front that are soon to be replaced with NWSL universals.

#2

Nice start Bart

#3

Turkey Day afforded me some time to work on Bartenstein’s Monster…driveline upgrade is complete…

Now the Question is to flywheel or not to flywheel…which is mainly for clearance issues…I can grind out the backhead to clear, but I’m not sure it would be worht the effort or the impact of the esthetics …people look inside O scale cabs these days…

I also put knife to styrene and got a nice start on a brand new tender…

#4

Extend the firebox and move the cab and trailing wheels back…keep the flywheel

#5

I agree I’ve already started deconstructing the firebox and extending the boiler barrel back half an inch. It clears the flywheel and make the locomotive look larger…

#6

Well…here is the rear of the boiler deconstructed and half an inch added to the length…

And then it was pretty simple to rebuild the firebox and backhead…still a bit of sanding and putty work to do…

And here is a good look at the project as a whole…I think moveing the cab back deinately makes the engine look better…

No I move on to getting the electronics on board. Now I know that the front engine picks up power from drivers on one side and the rear engine picks up power on the other, and I want to rig the tender trucks similarly…but danged if I can tell which is which…is there any way I can tell with a multimeter or something which is which?

#7

…winking…

#8

Using a multimeter touch the wire going from the truck with one lead and then touch each wheel on the tread. When you have zero (or near zero) resistance, that is the side that is picking up current.

Sometimes both sides are insulated from the axle. In that case you can rig a pick-up to gently touch the back of the wheels to pick up the current. If you want you can also pick up from all wheels on the tender by having wipers on all the wheels.

I found that the HO flat centering springs make good pick-ups. use the whisker that centers to rub on the wheel. With the size of your engine, current draw should not be a problem.

#9

I don;t have to engineer pickups its already there on the tender trucks already had wires running to them…its just that the donor locomotive was an HO scale 2-6-6-2T…and I have long ince forgotten whether the front or rear engine picked up on what side…this should help! thanks a bunch!

#10

So spent the bulk of Saturday rebuilding and riveting the firebox…the promptly discovered it was covered mostly by the cab…

After riveting the firebox…I decided tha tthe rivets on the smokebox were too clunky, so I peeled the jacket off and riveted a new one…

With the new wrapper applied…I transferred my attention to the tender sides…

#11

Any updates on this beast? I hope to do one similar one day, so was hoping some new pics may be around :slight_smile: