Jump to content

Commander Wolf

Eurobricks Citizen
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    364

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Commander Wolf

  1. Commander Wolf
    To be fair the reception is definitely not as good as some of my other PF models, but the alternative would have been to bury the receiver dome somewhere deep in the loco (ie have it accessible through a window, etc). At least compared to that option I think the current one is decent!
  2. Commander Wolf
    You should mount the battery box with the switch down, and then you can hide the cable lead in the big volume of the fuel tank. That's how I've got it on all my locos.
  3. Commander Wolf
    I have to rant now: I really liked these old gear motors too, until I found out about the cracking magnets. I had seven of these old motors stored, untouched, in a cool and dry location, for several years and just a few weeks ago I discovered that four of the seven had seized up due to the cracking magnet! Between the nine motors, I have total, this is a failure rate of almost fifty percent, which is absurd. It also seems like they are impossible to dismantle without damaging the coil assembly, so it's impossible to change the cracked magnet even if you could find a replacement. Maybe the motors that have worked 'til now aren't subject to this issue, but it seems to me that just every one of these motors is a time bomb. Very, very disappointed by the poor quality of these units.
  4. Commander Wolf
    My first train set was the 7715 push-along train, and I can definitely remember preferring to move the trains by hand back then! Crazy. I can see sunlight being a big issue if your trains are directly in the line of fire everyday, but if you display them far away enough from windows I imagine it can't be that bad?
  5. Commander Wolf
    At my usual scale I was actually surprised at how big the B1 was - it has considerably more external volume. Unfortunately, the extra space is needed to do some of the details like the curved front, so the internal volume isn't actually much bigger than that of the A6. I liked my B1 body a bit more, but I think the A6 is a better overall implementation.
  6. Commander Wolf
    Shortly after jtlan's CNJ1000, I set out to make a small PF boxcab of my own! I think like many of the earliest diesel electric locomotives in the US, the A6 had its beginnings in the Kaufman Act of the 1920s, which banned steam locomotives from operating in New York City. PRR built three A6 class two-axled switchers (3905-3907), one of which was repowered and reclassified A6B (3907), all of which operated in various New York yards between the late 1920s and late 1950s. Here is a picture of the lone A6B with some B1s up for scrap in 1961: This projext actually started out as one of those B1s, but along the way we found engineering drawings for the A6/B, and I was able to cram the drivetrain I'd designed for the B1 into the smaller body of the A6B. The unit is 24 studs long between couplers and has about 400 parts. The power comes from an AAA battery pack driving the old 9v geared motor. Not surprisingly the most difficult part of this model was figuring out how to position the battery pack, the geared motor, and that darn PF receiver inside the scaled dimensions of the loco. There weren't *that* many potential combinations of fit, but I had to go through a couple. In the end it's actually pretty tight given that the face of the receiver is already at the same height as the top of the curved slopes that make up the sides of the roof. The transmission is as simple as I could possibly make it: just 8-tooth gears meshed into 24-tooth crowns. You could actually speed this up by using 12 and 20 tooth bevels, but I prefer to go slower and have more pulling power - I want to be able to use the most worn out AAAs floating around and still go somewhere. Consequently the loco is *really* slow, but I'll call that a feature. Otherwise, the build is pretty straightforward, but I did try to make the top easily removable. My only real beef with this implementation is that the L drivers are slightly too big and the 1x1 tanks slightly too small. The receiption is also not amazing due to the positioning of the receiver, but it could be worse. There's a flap in the roof to access the power button. I have no idea what the big tank in the back is for. Someone enlighten me. More pics Bonus material #1: I tried my hand at "weathering" the unit by changing some of the brick colors, but I couldn't really get a combination with which I was happy: Bonus material #2: LDD of the B1 that I didn't finish. Pantographs are a pain. EDIT: Instructions now available for sale on Rebrickable: https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-76470/NonsenseWars/148-pennsylvania-railroad-a6b-v2-powered-up/#details
  7. Commander Wolf
    Heh, I'd love to keep my trains on display, but without an enclosed cabinet they just gather dust really fast. Instead, I ended up just keeping them in drawers lined with towels so they don't slip around and destroy themselves
  8. Commander Wolf
    The thing that's missing from this post is the pics of your layout. What's up with that? I'm still adamant that 9v is the way to go for sustained continuous running, but I've been starting to want to mess with a setup like this ever since I started dabbling in PF locos. I dunno if we have enough track to anything nearly so big though.
  9. Commander Wolf
    Myself and jtlan considered making them at one point, but nothing ever came of it. I'd think you'd want to use a stiffer material than aluminum though. I do agree that the $2 they were charging at pick a brick is pretty absurd.
  10. Commander Wolf
    This actually looks pretty good for how simple it is. How accurate is the geometry on the roof? It looks like there's a bit of play around the number connector at the top?
  11. Commander Wolf
    I'm just nitpicking, but I don't necessarily agree with this. While a lot of very narrow gauge systems do have significantly smaller loading gauges, many less narrow gauge systems (meter or cape) have loading gauges not much smaller than what you'd find in the UK. Modelling a narrow gauge system to me would suggest making narrower bogies rather than narrower carriages. Anyway, nice work on the train and the station, though I like the station more.
  12. Commander Wolf
    Especially fond of your lovely decals; nice work! What is the purpose of the pf reverser switch? Is it because you need to have both of the wired ends of the PF train motors facing the center of the locomotive?
  13. Commander Wolf
    I like the 4.5/12v style cranes; they look like they could be official sets - or at least something out of an ideas book. EDIT: Looking at your montage, are they from an idea book?
  14. Commander Wolf
    Is this actually modified from a Constitution train? It does look like something Lego would make. My only concern would be the wide spacing between the wheels under the cars, but that doesn't affect the overall look and feel. Nice.
  15. Commander Wolf
    It might be silly because it can't pull anything, but add couplers somehow and an Amtrak HHP-8 does look like that:
  16. Commander Wolf
    So are there actually any external differences between these two types of train motors, or do you just have to know when they were made or when you bought them?
  17. Commander Wolf
    Eight years is a long time to be working on any model... way to stick with it. Otherwise I'd say post more, bigger pics!
  18. Commander Wolf
    Yeah, this is how I've done it in all my previous locos. I put all those other gear stages in the U30 so I could change the gearing, but it's excess rather than necessity. With the vertical mounting I'd suggest using Ms because they are a stud shorter.
  19. Commander Wolf
    I used to really like this kind of layout, but these days it's a little too cluttered for me. Still cool to watch it run, though; the trains run surprisingly smooth. Is it all just typical PF equipment?
  20. Commander Wolf
    Aww, sorry to hear that it didn't work out! To me it seems like the biggest issue is that you've had to mount the battery box vertically, and therefore can't keep the body to be 6 studs tall - I don't know what's holding up the cab, but is there no way to move the motors further towards the ends? Otherwise concerning the extension and the polarity switch - in practice there's probably no reason to do this because you've have couplers on the ends of the bogies, so you'll always know which way they are supposed to face. If somehow you won't have couplers on the bogies, you can also build them to be rotationally symmetric, in which case it doesn't matter which way they are pointing too.
  21. Commander Wolf
    My gut feeling says it's probably a little too tall, but I like the way you've done the details on the front face, especially the little slanted bits.
  22. Commander Wolf
    It's not as if the arrangement won't work, it's just that the bogies won't spin as freely as they would had they been pinned properly, and you could deform the pin on the turntable in the long run.
  23. Commander Wolf
    The wheel was exactly what I thought of as well! What are you planning to do with all of these mechanisms you've made, are you going to build a big layout with everything included?
  24. Commander Wolf
    You know, it's a pity there aren't more of these left in the US when there's still a ton of GP/SD40s left from around the same era. Just wasn't that popular of a locomotive in the end. Thanks! Modern locos are pretty much just a big steel box, so I'm big on getting the "texture" of the sides right, and so far I've found that the tiles do a really good job. This really wouldn't have been as good before the advent of 2x4 tiles.
  25. Commander Wolf
    I kind of see where you're coming from, but I think it looks better with the black windows! It doesn't have as much personality with reds.
×
×
  • Create New...