I spent a lot of time on this car (getting zapped) , I would say that you nailed it. Nice job Bill ! Randy
Time for some steam locomotive fun on the bench. I picked up a Micro Ace Pacific a few years ago when it was on sale at my favorite Japanese etailer. I decided I needed a new passenger locomotive to pull my heavyweight Katy cars. The H-3 pacifics were their top of the line passenger power until the diesel era bumped them. Right now I just have a stock Atlas/Rivarossi boiler shell bashed onto the mechanism. Not sure if I will change the valve gear and cross heads to something more in line with North American practice or not. The oil bunker is part of the Micro Ace tender. It runs real sweet. The tender is a stretched Atlas/Rivarossi with modified Bachmann Commonwealth trucks off their old "Oil Tender". They have the same axle spacing on the outside wheels as the Kato passenger trucks from their CB&Q Budd cars. I have quite a collection of those trucks that I accumulated after de-skirting those cars and replacing their trucks. I had to file a notch in the brass insert to accommodate the center axle and drill out the bearing cups a little on the outside positions in the plastic side frames to clear the bearing cones of the brass inserts. They roll nice and pick up power real well.
Mike, That car is totally awesome, and a great example of the potential of 3d printing today (if only more guys would take advantage of it). The quality of the cars in the photos you show are totally acceptable to me for N scale. Are they the 'good" prints or the "bad" prints? Do you have any photos of some "bad" prints for a comparison. Frank
Thanks Frank. It's really a promising technology. There's so much more I want to try, but 3d modeling takes time, only so much of that... I would say the painted model shown is an "in-between". There are some better, some worse, the worse ones mainly suffer from a loss of rivet detail, the surface fuzz that can be sanded off of flat areas stays behind in detailed areas and obscures some of the rivet detail.
Area Wholesale Tire My next structure underway made from styrene. This is the third building I have worked and the steps I use are getting easier. Practice, practice, practice. The Southwestern Bell building I just built is visible in the upper left behind this new building.
Upgrading an old MRC RSD15 to a C&O RSD7. Same chasis with a new motor and flywheels. New brass handrails. Close pilots and MT couplers.
This project worried me. I took a NEW Bachman 0-6-0, removed the tender and added a Western Railcraft 'Shorty' Vandy tender. It was too wide and very light. I saned the sides and added piping and rivets. I had to rout out an area for the coupler ans level the under frame for the bolsters. I added a bell and new head and tender lamps as well as a pump and piping to the engine. Painted, decaled and weathered it for the SP who owned quite a few of these gems. Well...it all worked. It runs perfect......and this little gem WILL pull as many as 15 cars...............
You would think there would be a bunch of names of 12-1 cars on a sheet of decals because that was the most numerous heavyweight car built by Pullman and one of the most readily available models out there. However, that not being the case, one has to do some cutting and pasting. As you can see, I seem to do a lot of that. The EAST CAIRO was a 12-1 that was assigned to the Santa Fe and eventually bought by them with the breakup of Pullman in the late 40s. This is a Microtrains car that is getting the treatment. I think I have lost count of the Rivarossi ST CROIX models I have renamed.
Funny you should mention that. I made the same point over on railwire a few months back and Joe from Micro-Trains replied that they were working on adding car name decal sets to their Pullman cars. -Mark
I've lettered a bunch of the 12-1s .I've done many cars one letter at a time. I did a bunch of Irish named cars , there are a bunch of Mc ???? on the micro scale set. I did one fictional Mc Caffery car named after my grandmother, It fits the Pullman scheme of things. There are some sets out there designed for Milwaukee cars so I have a group of orange cars (the old Rivarossi 12-1 cars) lettered with the correct names . I sold a couple of custom named cars on E Bay but short of getting my money back it wasn't worthwhile. I sold the Mendota and the Monona I will replace those two at some point, (they might have been 10-1-2 cars) . I enjoy cutting and pasting to get some unusual names. Here's my list thus far: Orange Farm, McCumber, McKeages, Orange Park, McCaffery, McCutcheon, McGillivray, Woodland. Randy
I'm basing mine (more or less) on how they looked circa 1959 (when they were still operating in and out of Colorado Springs). I haven't decided yet if I'm going to man up and tear the roof apart or not (for the recessed radiators). But given long how it's taken just to get this far, I suspect I'll probably wuss out on that whole deal. -Mark
Finally have a workbench... Have long admired this thread and the work posted here-now I finally have a small addition of my own. Having mostly spent my modeling life layout building and not doing a whole lot of modeling off the layout. This past week I found myself with an oddly large amount of time to do with as I wished, and so, I opened up my recently acquired 'Finley House' by Laser-Art Structures. This is about 3/4 of the way done. This morning I finished it off, and find myself pleased, and my confidence lifted. Prior to this the most complex thing I'd built was Walther's New River Mine, so I was pleasantly surprised at how well-relatively of course-this has turned out. Inspired by my success, I decided to tackle something that had long intimidated me-a white metal (I think?) Railway Express Miniatures 100 ton lectra haul mine truck. Ta-da! Granted, neither shot is well lit, but the entire thing is lightly weathered for coal dust, dirt and general usage. Not quite finished yet, but still, very proud of another big step out of the comfort zone
Started working on a NS C40-9. I started with a Kato C44-9W and used Atlas B40-8 parts to get the correct cab, battery boxes, and nose. I had to fill in some areas with styrene to get things to line up properly. There's still a long way to go but it's a start. View attachment 48181
