Final Assembly

Once the body was finished, it was mated up with the chassis and tested on the rolling road. Unfortunately something was now binding. After a lot of messing around, I eventually discovered that one of the crank pins was slightly bent. A little tweaking cured the problem. I think it probably happened when I was test fitting the body before trimming the crank pins, when the rear right pin would have fouled the reversing linkage.

With everything running smoothly the brake gear was made up and fitted (see below) and the chassis was painted. Everything was reassembled for another test run on the rolling road. Once again it was not running as smoothly as I would have wished. Dropping the wheel sets revealed a minute amount of paint on the bearing surface of one of the axle slots. With this removed and everything put back together, we were back in business.

There was still one job left to do on the chassis, provide a means of electrical pick-up. The kit is designed for and includes plunger pick-ups. I am not a great fan of these. If you use them straight out of the packet, the springs are too strong causing excessive braking on the wheels and, over time, even causing the wheels to move on the axle leading to the dreaded wheel wobble. I have tried using weaker springs but even the electrical connection can have a detrimental effect. On the last chassis I built, I designed a system that combined the best points of plunger and wiper pick-ups which worked very effectively. Unfortunately, there was not enough room on this chassis to accommodate that solution so, as mentioned earlier, I opted to go with sprung wipers. Having made this decision early, I was able to solder a couple of mounting spacers into the chassis before it became too cluttered. The photograph at the bottom of this page illustrates how the system works, the front pick-ups are a mirror image of those at the rear. Rather than have a mass of wires running throgh the chassis, self adhesive copper tape is run along the inside of the side frames with short wire connections between these and the pick ups. In the short term the motor is also connected to these strips, in the long term it will be the DCC decoder. Unfortunately, when I carried out a test run, there was a dead short! I checked all the wiring, and ran it again without the body. Perfect. Fix the body, dead short returned. It transpired that one of the rear wheels was fouling the inside face of the splashers in the cab. This was easily cured, but why hadn't it happened previously?

With everything running smoothly, it was now time to do a spot of painting (see below).

So, thats about it. I still have the lining to do on the rear of the cab which is going to be a real pig. Once that's done I can get on with the weathering. Of course, there's still the DCC to be added, so watch this space.

In the meantime, now that I have a 16mm gauge loco to test it, I can start laying some track.