The Milwaukee Road Hiawatha F-7 project is under way!
Thanks to Bryan, I now have a nice set of line drawings that give me a good place to start. After enlarging the plans, I had a look to see how the Aristocraft Pacific motor block would look under the engine.
The spokes look out of place so something will have to be done about that. Upon closer examination of the driver, I noticed that there was a small recess between the tire and the spokes.
Part of this recess is taken up by the counter weight, but there is enough room to install a thin plastic disk with the appropriate style spokes. 
I have two options with this idea. I can put the drivers on a lathe and machine off the existing counterweight or I can simply cut the disc to fit around the existing counterweight.
I’ll experiment with the second option first and report back on the result.
Alright,
I had a couple of hours to kill in the shop before I had to go so I did a little work on the drivers.
I cut out a pattern for the divers and traced all of the holes onto the backside of some thin plastic.
The holes were cut out, and the insert was painted.
They were then placed over the existing spokes to see which spokes would have to be cut out.
Once the spokes were removed, the insert was dropped into place.
Not bad if you look at it from a distance.
Ok, I made a little more progress yesterday on the cab and boiler. It’s always intimidating when I first look at the outline of the engine and discover it has more complex curves than I originally anticipated, but once I start cutting and sanding, most of the problem spots seem to sort themselves out. Right now, it looks like the body will be broken down into three components. The main boiler and cab, The steam dome and smoke stack shroud, and the lower skirt. The photos below show the boiler and cab section that I’ve started on. The grove that I routered into the top is for the smoke stack shroud that I hope to finish in the next day or so. The lower skirt will be made of styrene just as soon as I get a chance to make a trip down to Tap Plastics.
Joel
Work has now begun on the plastic bits and pieces for the locomotive. This is usually the point in the project where I begin to glue my fingers to the model. Fortunately, the photos below are of low enough resolution that you cannot see the bits of skin still attached to the front of the engine. Now that I see how the pilot looks, I’m thinking of cladding the entire boiler in thin sheet styrene. That may cover up the divots that keep appearing every time I drop it!
I’ve decided to try sheathing this model in thin sheets of styrene plastic as opposed to the previous models which had a thick coat of polyester resin. This is bay far a more time consuming process than I originally imagined and I’m learning a lot as I go. I originally chose this model because I was under the impression that the simple curves would make it an easy one to build. Boy was I wrong. I spent most of my free time this past week gluing on the styrene sheets and most of yesterday trying to get the two from panels put into place. After much cutting and test fitting, I finally got the front panels in place. It took a lot of filling and sanding to finally get rid of all the joints, but the engine should look ok in the next series of photos.
I also took some time to start cutting out the window openings.
Still a lot to do but I’m moving on…slowly.
It’s been a very busy day for me.
This morning I decided to take a break from the bodywork on the locomotive and concentrate more on the pilot and trailing trucks.
After some digging around in ma parts bin, I came up with a set of wheels left form an old Bachmann 2-4-2 that gave up the ghost long ago. They were about the right size for the pilot wheels but they were spoked. To remedy this, I filled the gaps in with epoxy and machined away the excess until they looked the way I wanted them to. Below are photos of the wheels in there unfinished and finished and painted states.
Once that was done, I could mount the pilot wheels in their housing which is just a simple box made of styrene. The whole thing then got a shot of black spray paint.
Once the pilot was taken care of, I repeated the process with the trailing truck. A quick sort through by parts bin yielded a left over set of wheels from an aristocraft SD-45 motor block that were just about the right size for the trailing truck as well as a single freight car wheel set that was a good match for the smaller wheels on the trailing truck. Both sets of wheels were filled with expoy and machined.
While the Epoxy was drying on the rear wheels, I decided to do a little cheating and use an existing trailing truck form my 4449 daylight as a pattern for some parts on the new trailing truck. This involved simply mashing a bit of modeling clay onto the truck frame and then pouring some casting resin into the clay. Once it set, I removed the casting and cleaned it up. Later, portions of this casting will be reproduced, cut apart and added on to the styrene frames of the Hiawatha.
That’s it for now.
Some of the work shown here was done yesterday in one of those rare occasions when everything seems to go right and you move ahead with great speed. Anyway, the rear truck frame was laid out and cut from a sheet of 3/8” styrene.
The corners were then bent and appropriate cut outs were made.
I then cut up the castings that I made yesterday and began to apply them at the appropriate locations for the new truck.
Next project will be to put the wheels in place, but that’s for another day.
I spent the morning putting the rear trucks together. It took very little time and I was happy with the results. The one concern that I had was the clearance between the rear truck and the motor housing. It is very tight but will negotiate the 10’ dia. Curves on my layout. (With a little filing, it could go on 8-foot curves, but I don’t see the need for that now.
The other portion of the afternoon was dedicated to gluing narrow and thin slivers of styrene onto the side of the boiler. Very time consuming. I also left a considerable amount of skin on the model during the gluing. Got most of the skin off both the model and my fingers now!
I’ve been busy again this week!
I started the week by hollowing out the area behind the windows using a drill and dremel to give the cab some depth and eventually make room for and engineer and fireman.
Next, I cut some brass tube to use as spacers when I went to mount the motor block to the bottom on the body. Working with a wood sure gives you a lot of options form mounting stuff. It’s just a matte of drilling a hole and sticking in a screw.
Finally a fabricated a small brass post to mount the pilot truck to.
Once that was done, it was time to take it out onto the track for it’s first test run.
Everything seemed to work well and the engine had no trouble negotiating the 10’ turns.
Instead of waiting to order piston and drive rod parts from aristocraft, I decided to make them myself.
The portion that connects the piston to the drive rod was mad of a piece of 1/8 steel wire and plastic. Other parts were made of aluminum. That stuff is almost as easy to work as plastic!
Anyway, below are the photos of the progress so far.
Joel
Geometry is very unforgiving when I comes to drive rods and valve gear!
I’ve spent the past week trying to get everything working properly on my loco with horrific results.
Test 1: Loco goes 2 feet then piston rod bends at sharp angle and embeds itself into the top of the cylinder. Solution: Add piston guiding tubes to the side of the piston rod.
Test 2: Everything works well on straight track but once the loco enters a turn, the drivers slide to the side and cause the side rod to shift into the path of the main rod. The result is an protruding bolt strikes the mainrod, which then snaps off the cross head!
This makes a unique crunching sound that makes me shriek like a child and run to the site of the accident.
The solution to this problem was to move the piston rods to the outside of the cylinder. This is a compromise that I did not want to make, but it was the only way to fix the problem short of making a new, wider body.
See photo below.
Well, I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it, but I finally got the eccentric rods hooked up. It required bending the eccentric out a little and moving the link support to the far outside of the loco…but it works!
Initially I tried to make the rods of styrene, but it was too flimsy. I then decided to make them out of some square brass tubing with nuts soldered onto the ends. The color is not right, but the final painting will hide that and many other sins.
I’ve decided to put off adding rivets to the locomotive for now. Instead, I began working on the tender. I’ve departed form my standard procedure of using a solid block of wood. Now I’m using thin strips of wood glued up into a fairly simple box. The tender is going to take a lot less time to make than the loco! Also, my new six wheel trucks arrived from Aristocraft. As soon as the polyurethane dries, I will mount them under the tender.
I finally got around to snapping some photos of the tender. Yesterday I went to Tap Plastics and got some 1/16” and 1/8” styrene sheets. Buying in bulk is a lot cheaper than buying that stuff at the hobby shop.
Below are the photos of the progress so far.
Today I have to drive into town to get some specialized styrene shapes and will probably post more tonight.
I’ve been away in Texas this past week on training so I have not had much chance to play out in the garage. Made up for that today though, and was able to get a lot of work done on the Hiawatha. To start with, I made a set of marker lights for the sides. I then installed the handrails along the side of the loco using 1/16” brass rod and some very small cotter pins. The same technique was used for the handrail on the front of the loco with some additional fancy bending. The brass rod around the front of the loco had to be annealed prior to bending and is now quite soft and pliable.
The next step was to build some ribs for the side of the tender. These were made of flat styrene stock with half round peaces of styrene glued on top.
The ends were then filed to points and the remainder was trimmed off.
After that, It was time to paint. I did make a mistake by beginning to install hand rails on the tender and was forced to work around them. The rest of the handrails and ladders will not be applied until after I finish the painting.
I had a terrible time trying to paint this model!
To start with, the water based floquil paint that was “Milwaukee Road” orange is very thin. To make matters worse, the masking tape that I used allowed the watery paint to wick up underneath it
. I thought that I had caused this by not pressing hard enough on the tape and not holding the air brush far enough away from the project bot neither of these common remedies worked. The result is that my model has rough lines
. I may go back and re paint it some time, but I just don’t have the will to do it now.
On the plus side, the tender came out ok and I finally learned the trick to applying rub on letters to soft wood surfaces.
1 Make sure you are in a warm room and both the project and the rub on letter sheet are warm.
2 when pealing off the rub on sheet press down on the letter being applied with your fingernail against the edge that you are beginning to lift off.
3 sharply bend the sheet as you remove it.
This made all of the difference in the world and I had no problems with letters with very fine edges and lines.
Below are some photos of the model so far.
Next step will be to install the windows, doors, handrails, and ladders.
I spent yesterday cutting out some windows from a sheet of 1/8” thick plexi-glass that I picked up at tap plastics. I walked in and found it in their scrap bin for $2.00. This was a deal that I couldn’t pass up because I will be able to use the rest of the stuff for the windows in the 1” scale dover caboose that I also am working on.
It seems that whenever I use a template for cutting windows, I always wind up with windows that are too large. The result is that I have to individually grind them down to fit my openings. I have too things going for me with this technique. One is that all of the windows are unusually shaped with angles and curves which lends it self to custom cutting. The second is that the openings they are being put into are carved from pine so when all else fails, I just mash ‘em in really hard! I know this may sound like sacrilege for a modeler, but sometimes the “get a bigger hammer” philosophy actually works.
Below are some photos of the windows in place.
Normally I would have stopped there for the night but looking at the line drawing of the loco, I noticed that I was missing some silver pin striping that ran between the stack and the headlight. I had some silver pin-striping tape left over so I added that as well.
Tomorrow will be devoted to working on the running characteristics of the loco. In testing I discovered that the trailing trucks were too close to the last driver and when I backed it up, the driver caught on the trailing truck and lifted it off the rails. This will require a little modification to fix. The Pilot truck also needs some weight added to it. It has a tendency to “jump” a lot and I know it’s only a matter of time before it decided to jump the rails all together. Some lead should fix that problem.
Well, I didn’t do any work on the model today. Instead, I took her out and let her stretch her legs a little. Below is a video of the day’s run. Sorry about the camera data in the corner, I forgot to turn it off.
Hopefully I’ll get around to installing the headlamp and maybe a smoke unit. It sure needs one.
Joel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muJzGiKZkxA