October 31
Track building is on hiatus until I get my order of wood ties in. Hopefully it will arrive in the next week or so and I can extend track past Lower Clear Creek Siding. In the meantime, spiking operations continue - Forks Staging is complete and I'm about a third of the way along the "back run" to Cashier Stamp Mill.
My order of candidate detail parts arrived from PSC on Monday and so I've spent most of this week seeing if things will fit together and updating the scale drawings for the engines. Found a few tradeoffs have to be made from what I was originally hoping for:
- No leaf springs. I've found that the one type of leaf springs are two tall and occlude the flea motors and the other set (that included equalizer bars) don't have the proper spacing to fit the wheel base. Oh well.
- The candidate diamond stack I picked out was too short and didn't fit with the oil headlight, so I've got a taller one on order and we'll see how much I need to cut it down.
- Lastly, the saddle tank looks good but it's not going to leave enough room for putting the decoder between the motor and the saddle tank as I originally envisioned. After revisiting the scale drawings, I realized that if I widened the cab to an inch and raised it up a few millimeters, I'll be able to mount the decoder transverse in the wood box that is going under the cab floor.
I've still got a lot of details to put in, but I'm feeling confident enough of the drawings that I'll be starting the custom brass ordering later this week - I'll get the wheel bosses first and hopefully will start fabricating drivers by mid November.
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