DalaGStanator's Customs, Mods and Experiments

The boiler and smokebox have now been glued to the frame after another repaint. This time, the gold was a primer and a new dark green mixture was applied over it. Before adding the other details again, I wanted to make sure the stability problem wouldn't come back now that the boiler is smaller. When viewed from the front, it looks a bit off to the side compared to the cylinders. Not like a Shay's boiler, but still apparent from certain angles. Either way, it's more appropriately sized than the original and gives the whole thing a better look.



Rather than gluing the cab roof or adding pins/screws and holes, fasteners or whatever, I did the same thing I did for the footplate and gave it a square underneath to keep it from slipping off while being easy to remove. In addition, a thin bar was added between the rear ends of the cab walls.



After that, the drive unit was put back in the tender and tested again to check if the motor worked after being left on the desk (which it does). However, I didn't think I might have to reglue the wheels to the driven axle before I put the top back on. That would take nothing to fix, but it has a much bigger problem: the already bad noise of the gearing turned into a high pitched, insufferable shriek that sounds even worse than I remembered. It could be because the crown half of the custom gear scrapes against the shaft of the existing third gear, since I didn't want to trim the other (cylindrical) side of the crown. I'll have to remove the DU again and replace the fourth gear, if not go back to the original low torque setup. The current shape of the tender body looks fine to me, so it could be a challenge to build a new chassis that still fits.