Vance-
I know three people with Accucraft C-16's two of them have installed RC gear
the other (Harlan Barr) kept his manual. One thing that both people with
RC did was drop a sealed gel-cel battery directly into the water in the
tender to power the RC gear. RC in the C-16 is tricky. I have yet to see
the Johnson bar get successfully controlled by a servo. The problem that
both folks had was that J-bar would periodically get jammed after the engine
heated up. One guy was also having huge problems with glitching. The
glitching combined with the easily jammable J-bar resulted in great
frustration as the loco would screech to a halt in the middle of the run.
Both folks would end up running the engine by throttle control only. The
C-16 runs good though, and it is strong -- easily pulling 20+ cars on level
track. The only other draw back is that the drivers easily slip on certain
types of track. I can tell you that code 215 nickel silver track wont
provide much grip. It sure is a good looking engine though. I'm thinking I
might get one myself.
-Eric M.
> From: "VR Bass" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Date: Sat, 8 Sep 2001 22:23:08 -0600
> To: Multiple recipients of sslivesteam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Accucraft C-16
> I got my live steam Accucraft C-16 last night (finally!). It's the old-timer,
> No.
> 42, and beautifully done. But I do have some questions and observations I
> would like to share with you.
>
> I note that the footplate extension (that flap between the cab floor and the
> tender) is hinged at the bottom of the side floors, rather than the middle
> well
> where the firebox it. In other words, it does not extend over to the tender,
> but
> just hangs down about 1/2" too high, does nothing useful, and probably gets in
> the way of various operations in the cab. Are they all attached this way?
> What have you done about it? Looks like I'll need to remove the pivot rod,
> drill
> out the cab mounting brackets at their bottoms, and put in some kind of boss
> for the rod to go through. Cotter pins come to mind.
>
> The headlight looks very nice, but since it's not electrified, they left out
> the
> bulb, so there's a black hole in the center of the reflector. I removed the
> headlight and bracket (4 screws), then removed the headlight from the bracket
> (another 4 screws) and then removed the bottom plate from the headlight
> casting (two more screws). Seems like it would be relatively easy to insert a
> yellow LED and a tiny battery in there, with a micro switch out the bottom.
> Has anyone done this already, and if so would you share recommendations?
>
> The tender is huge, with lots of room for water and a hand pump and/or R/C
> gear. Except that they seem to have brazed the whole thing together and you
> can't get into the body unless you cut a hole up through the floor. Before I
> remove the frame and trucks to attempt this, do we have any other alternatives
> to getting into the tender body that I haven't discovered?
>
> Putting R/C in this one is going to be a big job, it appears. In addition to
> the
> inaccessible tender tank, the coal bin is filled with a really large gas tank
> (which is good) so there is no room for R/C gear there (too bad). The cab is
> stuffed full of other appliances and the crew floors are higher than the
> footplate, so there's even less room in there than in the Ruby for servos, let
> alone a battery pack and RX. And the steam regulator handle sticks way out
> the back of the cab. which is going to make placing a servo ... um ...
> interesting. The instructions, which I suspect were not written by the loco's
> designer, mention that it wasn't designed with R/C in mind (duh!) and that
> installing R/C will take some "ingenuity". Yep.
>
> You won't believe this one. The coupler height is low, set at the Kadee "G"-
> scale gauge height. What?!? Looks like some hacking of the rear tender
> beam will be in order. Maybe I should just go for all link-and-pin
> couplers
>
> Now, I've got to get all those built-up boxcar kits painted, finish the
> caboose,
> etc. etc., in addition to "improving" the loco to meet my standards. If they
> would have only asked me first, they could have saved me so much trouble! :-)
>
> Haven't run it yet, so I can't comment on running characteristics, but it was
> obviously fired and run some so I trust it will be in pretty good adjustment.
>
> regards,
> -vance-
>
> Vance Bass
> Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
> Small-scale live steam resources: http://www.nmia.com/~vrbass
>
