25
to the drawing board. I took Kadee No. 7 underset couplers, trimmed the back part of them off, and put them in modi- fied No. 8 draft gear boxes. I had to trim everything short so there was enough clearance for the trucks to pivot. From the start I planned on equip- ping my little Shay with a sound de- coder. And while small ones are avail- able, I wasn’t able to hide a small enough speaker anywhere in the en- gine – not even under the cab roof or in the fuel bunker. So, I settled on a tiny Digitrax DZ125 decoder.
After assembling the engine so I could take photos of it in its “unvar- nished” state, I disassembled it and washed it thoroughly–first in dish de- tergent, then paint thinner, and then dish detergent a second time. After it had dried completely, I sandblasted the
major
25: Prior to painting, the model was disassembled into subassemblies so that it could be throughly cleaned. 26: After painting, the decoder was installed in the fuel bunker atop the flat can gear motor. A sheet lead weight can be seen behind the motor and decoder.
26 subassemblies using a
Badger abrasive gun and washed everything a fourth time in prepara- tion for painting. I have found out the hard way that some paints don’t adhere well to bare brass, even with the etching achieved with abrasive blasting, so I first paint my brass models with Eastwood (
http://www.eastwood.com/) black self- etching primer. It dries very fast, so don’t leave the primer in your airbrush too long. The engine subassemblies looked so good after I sprayed them with the self-etching primer that I did- n’t paint over it.
After painting the subassemblies, I
nally settled on a 2-56 round head screw that is seated in a counterbored hole made from various diameters of brass tubing.
The truss rods weren’t too hard to
make. They are, after all, only bits of wire with Precision Scale unions sol- dered on to represent the tensioning devices. The truss rod attachments on the frame were a bit tricky, but only be- cause they were pretty small. I made them from short lengths of ¹₃₂″ diame- ter, thin wall brass tubing and bits of ¹₆₄″×¹₁₆″ brass bar. Why didn’t I just bend the ends of the trussrods and in- sert them into holes in the frame? OCD, of course!
Once I had the truss rods finished, I moved on to the end beams. I patterned
RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN
the end railings after some I had seen on Shays in the book Kinsey Photogra- pher; The Locomotive Portraits. They’re nothing more than .014″ diameter brass wire formed and soldered in place. I made the coupler lift bars from the same wire and attached them to the end beams with Precision Scale No. 3339 coupler lift bar brackets. I shaped the lift bars like ones I found in the Kinsey book. By the way, the rear sand box is the same size as the one that came with the Keystone Shay kit, but I made it from brass.
I assembled the model (without the motor) just to look at it and take some photos. That’s when I found that the Kadee No. 8 couplers sat way too low. They almost dragged on crossties. Back
cleaned the wheelsets and crankshaft bearing surfaces as well as the sliding surfaces of the line shaft slip joints. When I reassembled the drive mecha- nism to run it in with lubrication, the rear truck would run properly only in reverse. In forward motion, it bound up so completely that the female half of the coupling on the truck gearbox twisted right off the worm shaft. I had that little truck apart two or three times before I had it freed up (and I still don’t know what I did to get it un- bound). However,
the coupling still
twisted off the shaft, now because the inside diameter was worn larger. For- tunately, I had a spare part that I could drill out and press on the shaft. Then, running in the mechanism went off without a hitch. Such are the “joys” of scratchbuilding locomotives. Lettering the engine with decals and weathering it to look like it has spent many years in a dusty quarry doesn’t need much of an explanation. We prob- ably all have our own favored tech- niques. I tend to use powdered pastel chalks and light sprays of Floquil weathering colors. During final assem- bly, I wired in the decoder and Minia- tronics 1.5-volt bulbs with what I
79
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100