Now we have to decide how wide the engine will be. A Bachman hopper is about 4" wide and a Hartford 4-wheel flat is about 5" wide. So I split the difference and cut two pilot beams 4 ½" long by 1 3/8" high by 7/16" thick from some poplar I had lying around in my shop. I scored them with a hacksaw blade, then smoothed the scoring with a hand held wire brush, and then dyed them with black shoe dye.

I was concerned with the strength of the styrene plastic enclosure I built to enclose the motor block, which is why I reinforced the overhanging parts on the front and rear. I made up some small brackets from pieces of 3/16" by 0.040" brass strip. Before I bent them, I drilled clearance holes for 2-56 bolts. I use stainless steel nuts and bolts from Micro-Fasteners for strength because our models do tend to get heavy when we fill them with batteries and control systems. I bolted the brackets through the side frames and then drilled out and bolted on the pilots. I painted the motor block enclosure Floquil Rail Brown.

Now it is time to start building the body of the engine. A close look at the prototype photo shows us what appear to be pieces of steel angle used to outline the hood and cab and then either plywood or sheet metal was used to fill in. I opened my junk drawer and looked through the collection of shapes and strips that I have accumulated over many years. I found a good supply of brass angle pieces, 3/16" by 0.020". You can use brass angle as I did, or use plastic angle pieces, or skip these pieces and build your body to fit the frame and pilots, which define and limit its shape. Looking at the prototype photo I saw that the hood was a bit longer than the cab so that is how I built the outline for the body that you see in the photo below. The brass framework is just sitting in place on top of the frame. The width of the cab, 4 5/8" is the same as the pilots and the cab is 2 3/8" front to rear and 4 ½" high excluding the curved roof supports. I made the hood 2" wide and the radiator opening 2 1/8" high. How did I come up with these dimensions? Easy, I sketched what "looked right" according to the prototype photo on a piece of graph paper and went from there. What we are doing in 7/8" scale is the same thing that the shop guys did at Dura Lumber Company years ago. They built an engine with what they had and they built the cab big enough for two guys, side by side and the hood wide enough for the engine they used. My hood overhangs the frame a bit while the prototype appears to be a bit narrower than the frame. This is to make sure that it will hold two standard NiCad batteries.

The next step is to attach the plastic body pieces. I simply put a piece of styrene against the body shell, marked it with a pencil, and then scored and snapped it to the proper shape. The cab pieces all fit inside the brass angles and the hood pieces fit on the outside. I used a 5-minute epoxy and lots of clothespins to hold everything in place until the epoxy cured. It is a cut and fit process. An alternative would be to just cut the pieces from plastic and glue them together with plastic cement and eliminate the angle pieces. This is up to the individual modeler. Another alternative would be to use plastic angle pieces and then pre-make the sides by gluing on the angle pieces. Then is would be easy to glue in the back and the bottom and so on until the body was complete. Once the body is complete, it is time to paint it. I decided to paint body the body and frame with Floquil Rail Brown because I wanted to try the technique I have read of over the years of painting rubber cement on top of a rust color and then spraying on the finish color and then pulling some of the finish off with masking tape. So I tried it and it turned out OK. I painted on rubber cement, let it dry, than sprayed with a Floquil Blue color and allowed that to dry. Using pieces of masking tape pressed on to the paint here and there, I was able to remove large patches of blue exposing the rail brown underneath. The last thing I did was to take a small piece of window screen, paint it black and glue it in place inside the radiator opening in front of the hood.

The next thing I did was to drill 2 holes in the bottom of the hood front and 2 in the rear of the cab. Then I marked these holes on top of the frame and drilled through to clear my favorite 2-56 stainless steel bolts. The holes are placed so that they are accessible from below so that the body can be bolted to the frame with 4 2-56 nuts.

Now is the time to add some details and there are not very many according to the prototype photos. The prototype had link & pin couplers but I use Kaydee couplers so I constructed a surface mount coupler as shown in the photos. There are many prototypes for these and even some with multiple openings for the coupler so that it can be raised or lowered. The prototype coupler shown is on a standard gauge, 8 ton, Vulcan at the South Carolina Railroad Museum. Note that it is raised up above the top of the pilot to match the standard coupler height of the cars. It has a piece of heavy angle iron behind the coupler base that is bolted to the top of the cast iron pilot and then to the coupler base.

I made my version by assembling the Kaydee coupler box, sanding it flat on all sides, and then I epoxyed it to a piece of plastic to serve as the base. Then I cut, fit, and epoxyed on the remaining pieces. I drilled holes for 2-56 bolts in the base and the pilot and then epoxyed it all together.

The next detail to add is the winch and the one Ozark Miniatures makes is just perfect. I assembled and painted the winch according to Ozark's excellent instructions. I cut a thin piece of brass and made up two reinforcing pieces of brass and bolted and epoxyed it to the front pilot as a mount for the Ozark winch. What I mean by bolting and epoxying something together is that I drill clearance holes for the bolts, put in some epoxy, and then stick in the bolts. This provides a very strong mount. I then glued a thin piece of plastic that simulates anti-skid steel plate on top and then bolted on the winch with 2-56 bolts and nuts.

The photo below is staged and shows the engine assembled. I built a short piece of track and added gravel ballast and set this on a sawhorse out in my back yard. I then move the camera around and turn the sawhorse until I have a good shot of the engine with a nice background.

In Part III, we will talk about Power and Control for this little homebuilt critter.