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
