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ba4990
Engine Wiper
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 Posted - 12/07/2010 : 1:34:57 PM
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Hello All,
I'd like to share with you an ongoing project of mine. The Bachmann On30 inside frame 4-4-0 is a nice running little engine but IMHO detail wise it has some issues. Firstly the boiler is too long for the engine. Americans of the period should have the backhead just ahead of the rear driver axle. Also like many "store bought" engines the backhead is not correct. The area below the cab is way too clunky and the area between the first set of drivers and cylinders should be more open with Stephenson valve gear visible. I would also like to install a Tsunami decoder and hide the wires between the engine and tender. Finally I would like to increase the level of detail as that is were I find my fun.
First is the boiler. I origianally was not going to shorten the boiler. I had stripped the paint and removed all the parts. I was not terribly pleased with the rivet detail on the smoke box so filed/sanded them smooth and replaced with Grant line .030” round-head rivets. Below is a pic after stripping. The large hole in the second course was an attempt to move the sand dome to the taper course. That will disappear later.
Download Attachment:  boiler 1.jpg
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After studying the model a bit, I found that if I removed the flywheel from the motor, I could shorten the motor block thus allowing me to shorten the boiler.
Download Attachment: motor block 4.JPG
98.63 KB
Download Attachment: boiler 2.JPG
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I also shortened the frame and milled a slot for a exhaust cam. I will build a new tail piece for the frame that will be attached to the boiler assembly and will be attached by a screw to the rest of the frame.
Download Attachment: FRAME BOTTOM.jpg
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Here are the boiler, motor block and frame together after cutting. The firebox still is a little too long, but it is better. The bit of plastic at the end is my first attempt at the tail piece. I didn’t like it and rebuilt it.
Download Attachment: boiler n frame.JPG
63.43 KB
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Bill Allen
Arbor Creek & Middle River Valley Railway |
Country: USA
| Posts: 193 |
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acousticco
Fireman
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Posted - 12/07/2010 : 2:38:53 PM
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Nicely done Bill! I'll be watching this build closely, I've got a Bachmann Forney that I feel needs some (additional) modifications (it's already been regauged to On3). What did you use to strip the paint from the boiler?
Regards,
Cody
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Country: Canada
| Posts: 1670 |
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ba4990
Engine Wiper
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Posted - 12/07/2010 : 4:46:05 PM
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Thanks for the compliment Cody. The boiler was stripped sometime ago. We've recently moved and I'm just getting things going again on trains. But I've only used two strippers, one is the tried and true brake fluid. This is likely the one as the boiler is all metal. The other one is a stripper that I got from the hobby shop. I'll have to look that one up as my memory is not what it used to be. In either case, I do remember that the boiler sat in the stripper for a couple of days and I ended up doing some wire brushing to get the nooks and crannies clean.
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Bill Allen
Arbor Creek & Middle River Valley Railway |
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Country: USA
| Posts: 193 |
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ba4990
Engine Wiper
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Posted - 12/07/2010 : 4:55:43 PM
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Cheers All!
Onward:
About that back head; since I shortened the boiler I had to make a new one. Noticed the clear difference between the stay bolts on the lower half and the rivets which would secure the back head braces above the crown sheet on the upper half of the back head. Around the edge is a narrow strip of .010” styrene with Grandt Line conical rivets representing the outside firebox sheet extending past the lagging on the boiler.
Download Attachment: backhead.jpg
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Finally, the boiler was sheathed in .005” styrene to represent the sheet metal covering the lagging and the back head was cemented to the rear of the boiler. Washout plugs were also made and applied. In this pic you can also see the new frame tail piece and the beginning of the cab bracket. More about that later. Thanks for stopping by.--Bill
Download Attachment: boiler 4.JPG
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Bill Allen
Arbor Creek & Middle River Valley Railway |
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Country: USA
| Posts: 193 |
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ba4990
Engine Wiper
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Posted - 12/08/2010 : 2:01:54 PM
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Greetings from chilly Iowa!
Firstly, I want to make sure I’m not misleading anybody. So far I am bringing you up to date with what I’ve done so far. Some of this was done last year before a move and a job change interrupted the work. I’m afraid I don’t work too fast.
How ‘bout we look at the tender next. Bachmann actually did a pretty fair job on the tender for this engine. The tank perfectly matches the dimensions for the tank on the Eureka, a Baldwin built 3’ gauge American of the 1870’s though the frames are somewhat different. Though this tender could be used pretty much as it with a few changes to sharpen up the details, I decided to make some fairly radical changes. Probably the largest change I made was to make a new frame. I like the look of wooden tender frames (though a steel frame would be just as correct on this engine), I wanted to lengthen the frame a bit to allow for a tool box on the rear as well as to allow me to further separate the trucks to allow for tender brake detail. I also wanted to hide the wires between the engine and the tender and I had an idea that might allow me to do this.
This is an overall view of the frame. The side and intermediate sills are 0.125”x 0.200” and the center sill is 0.250”x0.200”. The end beams are milled from silver maple twigs from my yard. I was experimenting to see if I could get a more correct end grain pattern. All the wooden parts are pre-stained to represent solid but weathered wood and the metal parts are painted to represent surface rust with some staining of the surrounding wood. This will then be covered with the finish color (black) and some scraped away to represent paint flaking.
[img]http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/data/ba4990/2010128134935_tdr frame.JPG[img]
This is the rear end beam with coupler pocket. The coupler pocket was built up from rectangular styrene tubing, sheet and section of round tubing for the striker plate. It represents a link and pin couple pocket and is sized to match a San Juan Tender/Loco Sharon Coupler (Style #5105).
[img]http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/data/ba4990/2010128135146_tdr frame 6.JPG[img]
The end braces between the side and intermediate sills have yet to be applied. There will be two per end and are what the six nbw’s on each side of the sill are for. I made a master and cast these. This was my first experience with resin casting and worked pretty well after a few tries.
[img]http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/data/ba4990/2010128135317_frame casting.JPG[img]
This is the front end beam with the buffer and draw bar pocket. My plan is to route the wires to the tender through the hollow buffer and center sill into the tender tank.
[img]http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/data/ba4990/2010128135418_tdr frame 2.JPG[img]
[img]http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/data/ba4990/201012813551_tdr frame 5.JPG[img]
My biggest problem with the tank was that there was no rivet detail on the top of the tank, the most visible part. Another inaccuracy, though very subtle, is that there are no overlapping sheet joints. Tenders from this period we made from several bent and formed pieces of sheet metal joined together in lap joints secured with rivets.
The sides of the tank have pretty good rivets and for the most part the right size and in the right place but no lap joint. I was going to pretty much leave well enough alone until I was introduced to Archer rivets. These rivets are applied like decals. So I set to work on the tank with the sanding sticks.
[img]http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/data/ba4990/2010128135619_tank.JPG[img]
The top had just too many holes to fill. So I removed the water fill hatch, made a template out of card stock and made a new top using 0.005” clear plastic. I chose clear because it would allow me to find the water fill hole more easily and well, I had it on hand.
[img]http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/data/ba4990/2010128135723_tank 3.JPG[img]
This view kind of shows how the lap joints are represented.
[img]http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/data/ba4990/2010128135824_tank 2.JPG[img]
Well that’s it for right now. Thanks for stopping by.
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Bill Allen
Arbor Creek & Middle River Valley Railway |
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Country: USA
| Posts: 193 |
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ba4990
Engine Wiper
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Posted - 12/08/2010 : 2:07:18 PM
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ARGH!  Supposed to be [\img] at the end.  Oh well. I will fix this later this afternoon. Sorry for any inconvenience. Lunch hour is over, back to work! 
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Bill Allen
Arbor Creek & Middle River Valley Railway |
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Country: USA
| Posts: 193 |
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acousticco
Fireman
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Posted - 12/08/2010 : 2:36:55 PM
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Nice work on the tender, I like the lengths you're going to to build a better model. Have you tried the Archer rivets yet? They're something I've been thinking of trying out, and I've seen them used to great effect of armor models.
Cheers,
Cody
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Country: Canada
| Posts: 1670 |
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ba4990
Engine Wiper
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Posted - 12/08/2010 : 5:25:11 PM
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OK, going to try this again with pix. 
This is an overall view of the frame. The side and intermediate sills are 0.125”x 0.200” and the center sill is 0.250”x0.200”. The end beams are milled from silver maple twigs from my yard. I was experimenting to see if I could get a more correct end grain pattern. All the wooden parts are pre-stained to represent solid but weathered wood and the metal parts are painted to represent surface rust with some staining of the surrounding wood. This will then be covered with the finish color (black) and some scraped away to represent paint flaking.
This is the rear end beam with coupler pocket. The coupler pocket was built up from rectangular styrene tubing, sheet and section of round tubing for the striker plate. It represents a link and pin couple pocket and is sized to match a San Juan Tender/Loco Sharon Coupler (Style #5105).
The end braces between the side and intermediate sills have yet to be applied. There will be two per end and are what the six nbw’s on each side of the sill are for. I made a master and cast these. This was my first experience with resin casting and worked pretty well after a few tries.
This is the front end beam with the buffer and draw bar pocket. My plan is to route the wires to the tender through the hollow buffer and center sill into the tender tank.
My biggest problem with the tank was that there was no rivet detail on the top of the tank, the most visible part. Another inaccuracy, though very subtle, is that there are no overlapping sheet joints. Tenders from this period we made from several bent and formed pieces of sheet metal joined together in lap joints secured with rivets.
The sides of the tank have pretty good rivets and for the most part the right size and in the right place but no joint. I was going to pretty much leave well enough alone until I was introduced to Archer rivets. These rivets are applied like decals. So I set to work on the tank with the sanding sticks.
The top had just too many holes to fill. So I removed the water fill hatch, made a template out of card stock and made a new top using 0.005” clear plastic. I chose clear because it would allow me to find the fill hole more easily and well, I had it on hand.
This view kind of shows how the lap joints are represented.
As always, thanks for stopping by.
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Bill Allen
Arbor Creek & Middle River Valley Railway |
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Country: USA
| Posts: 193 |
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ba4990
Engine Wiper
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Posted - 12/08/2010 : 5:34:21 PM
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Hi Cody,
Thanks for the comments. I've tried the Archer Rivets on the boiler. I used N scale rivets to represent the screws that hold the pieces of the boiler jacket together. I found that they went on pretty easy. The only problem I had was that after drying, they scraped off easily. Now, I had applied them to bare plastic and had not yet sealed them with paint so it probably wasn't too surprising that they were quite fragile when handled. The up side was that it was easy to scrape the damaged rows off with a finger nail. From now on I won't put the rivets on until just before I paint the piece.
Cheers!
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Bill Allen
Arbor Creek & Middle River Valley Railway |
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Country: USA
| Posts: 193 |
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ba4990
Engine Wiper
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Posted - 12/09/2010 : 1:37:10 PM
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Greetings all,
On to the motor block. I’m not sure, but I suspect that this is the same motor block for Bachmann’s HO 4-4-0. What causes me to think this is the spacing of the stay bolts cast into the firebox sides. As near as I can figure they seem to be about on 2” centers in O scale. Way too close for O scale but just right for HO scale. Therefore, after removing the motor, I milled the detail off and narrowed the block about 0.030” on each side. BTW, forgive the rough milling, this was my first experience with my little (read tiny) mill. I’m still on the steep end of the learning curve when it comes to machining.
I also found the lug to attach the forward end of the firebox to the frame pretty lunky and it filled an area that should be open. So I removed it, and used an 0-80 flat head screw instead.
I then made a wrapper to add the firebox detail to the motor block. This will not only correct the stay bolt and rivet detail, but will add detail to the throat sheet (front sheet of the firebox), and add washout plug detail at the corners of the fire box. The wrapper will be left loose and merely be clamped between the motor block and frame.
The wrapper is a basic open box made of 0.020” styrene. The sides are overlaid with 0.010” styrene to represent the ½” firebox side sheets. The box is long enough to go around the front of the motor block and line up with the rear of the backhead on the boiler. I made a form for the front and rear parts of the box out of brass strip. It was bent into squared off “C” shape that was the same width as the frame, minus 0.060”. Then strips of 0.020” styrene were clamped to this and immersed in boiling water for 15 seconds. This way the corners of the firebox have the correct rounded corners. The rest was a lot of fiddly filing and fitting. The rivet holes are drilled on 0.060” centers. The stay bolts are 0.020” styrene rod cemented into #76 holes drilled on scale 4” centers. After the cement has dried over night, I cut them .0005” above the surface using sprue cutter and then round them over slightly with fixture I made from 0.040” brass rod. I represent the weep hole in the staybolt by pricking it with a fine sewing needle held in a pin vise (I know, crazy, but I did it).
That’s it for now. Thanks for stopping by!
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Bill Allen
Arbor Creek & Middle River Valley Railway |
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Country: USA
| Posts: 193 |
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acousticco
Fireman
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Posted - 12/09/2010 : 7:18:05 PM
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Remarkable attention to detail Bill, great stuff! Another gentleman on the forum (Dave / Thorn Creek & Western) is doing some similar upgrades to an HO scale Bachmann 4-4-0 : http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=26105 . I appreciate the step by steps from both of you because I have a few of these to work on one day... Looking forward to the next installment!
-Cody
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Country: Canada
| Posts: 1670 |
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ba4990
Engine Wiper
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Posted - 12/14/2010 : 1:31:31 PM
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Just thought I’d toss in some of the details I’ve worked on for this engine. Some of these were done before I considered taking in-progress pix so there won’t be so much of a step-by-step to this.
First is the 8-inch Westinghouse air pump. The 8-inch pump is an older style pump. I’ve seen them in pictures as early as 1890 and as late as the early 1900’s. I chose this style of pump to further imply that this is an older engine, even in 1905. They were not as successful as the more familiar 9 ½ inch pump, the one with the fins on the air (lower) cylinder. For one thing they were kind of a maintenance pain as each air valve was a slightly different size (which could easily be mixed up) where as all the other single cylinder air pump had only one sized air valve. I had purchased a brass investment casting, however, after receiving the part I found it to be a very poor casting. So I decided to make one myself. While a bit fiddly, I would have to say it was not as difficult as I had expected. I made the pump from bits and pieces of styrene tube, hex rod, round rod and sheet. I turned all 4 cylinder heads together using a dremel tool held in a vice. A 00-90 screw was used to hold them together and chuck them. The cylinder head bolts were indexed using a small protractor to layout a template which was used in a fixture. This fixture was a .080” thick piece of styrene sheet with a 00-90 bolt up through it. The turned cylinder heads were screwed on to the 00-90 bolt, then the template was screwed down on top of them and tightened with a 00-90 bolt. Then I used a drill press to drill the 0.016” holes for details west nb castings.
First the fixture.
Then the finished pump. If anybody is really interested in doing this, let me know and I will try to be more detailed with what I did.
Keeping with an airbrake theme next was the engine brakes. On the stock model, the brake cylinders are represented between the drivers and a facsimile of the brake shoes are there, however there is no connection between the two. Well, to a detail nut like me that just won’t do. What I was aiming for is sort of like this from an Illinois Central Tank Engine 201 at the Illinois Railroad Museum:
I kept the original brake cylinders for right now, but I’m still considering whether or not to replace them. I removed the stock brake shoes and built the rest of the rigging and shoes. The most challenging bit was drilling the holes in the 0.020” brake shoe pins for the cotter keys.
Finally I have done some work on the Stephenson valve gear. This just going to be represented and will not be working. The hardest part was milling the slot in the link. I did this by first drawing a 1” scale drawing of a Stephenson link for a narrow gauge American locomotive. If there is something just not quite right about you, you can find some books on Google books which will explain how to design the link, given the driver diameter, the valve travel etc, like I did. Or you can find a set of drawings for a similar sized locomotive that give some hint of the link dimensions and work from them. After drawing the scale drawing, I scanned it into my computer and using the program ScalePrint, reduced it to O scale. I then used ACC to cement the printed drawing onto 0.030” sheet styrene and milled the slot using the smallest ball mill I could find. The ends of the slot were squared off using a piece of a jeweler’s saw blade held in a pin vise.
Here is the fixture for milling the slot.
And the valve gear
Well that’s it for now. Thanks for stopping by. Always a pleasure.
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Bill Allen
Arbor Creek & Middle River Valley Railway |
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Country: USA
| Posts: 193 |
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Geezer
Engineer
Premium Member
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ba4990
Engine Wiper
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Posted - 12/15/2010 : 2:23:26 PM
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Greetings Friends,
Thanks Cody and Geezer for your comments. I hope that at least some of the stuff I’m doing might be interesting to others. Between a very busy job and a somewhat secluded home I’m kind of isolated from other model railroaders in this area. It’s really nice to share and get some feed back.
Well, I think there’s been about enough updating. I’m sure as things progress, I’ll run into something that will be already done and need to be explained, but be that as it may…
This past weekend I was able to get a fair amount of train time in. Winter storms are good for that. I was able to finish the cab bracket and frame tailpiece assembly. This pic shows the assembly attached to the boiler and sitting on the frame.
This earlier pic (from before I finished the bracket) of the underside of the cab floor area shows the hole for the 00-90 screw which attaches the rear of the boiler/frame end assembly to the back of the frame. The chunk of plastic to the right of the hole fits into a slot in the frame and acts as a key to keep the assembly square to the frame.
I also finished the dome tops and attached them to the boiler assembly.
Now I turned my attention to the tender. I am switching the trucks to a swing motion type of truck. I ordered a set of SPC 3’7” Macleod Western (#T-16) trucks as well as wooden brake beams (FMW-4000) and the brake levers (FMW-4004) from Foothill Model Works. The brake beams are for On3 so they had to be narrowed by about 0.160”.
Here they are cut, cemented and putty’d.
I built a new water fill hatch starting with 0.010” styrene for the flange. The fill hatch is 1/4'” tubing and I made a 2” flange. To layout the rivets I determined from pix of similar hatches that there were about 48 rivets on the flange. I then laid out on a piece of cardstock one pair of rivets on a circle of the right size 7 ½ degrees apart (360/48=7.5). I then set my dividers to the linear distance between the two rivet centers. Then it was simply a matter of walking the dividers around the centerline for the flange rivets. The rivets themselves are from Scale Hardware part #RIVT-04-B.
The fill hatch itself was made from a ¼” piece of tubing 0.200” long. I filed a depression running the length of the tube to represent where the prototype lap seam would be and placed rivets along the seam. Here they are together
Every once in a while during a build I like to stack the parts together to get a general idea how the project is shaping up, does all the parts fit together and well, just to give me a little inspiration to keep going. Here are a few of where I’m at so far.
As always, thanks for stopping by. Happy Modeling!
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Bill Allen
Arbor Creek & Middle River Valley Railway |
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Country: USA
| Posts: 193 |
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LandNnut
Fireman
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Posted - 12/15/2010 : 10:41:08 PM
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quote:
Man0manoman!!!
Geezer I said the exact same thing out loud moments before I read your post.
L&N nut
Jon
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Country: USA
| Posts: 1574 |
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acousticco
Fireman
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Posted - 12/16/2010 : 12:03:58 AM
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Looks so good Bill! Really gives me something to strive for in my own modeling. I love this kind of work.
-Cody
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Country: Canada
| Posts: 1670 |
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boiler 1.jpg
motor block 4.JPG
boiler 2.JPG
FRAME BOTTOM.jpg
boiler n frame.JPG
backhead.jpg
boiler 4.JPG