Del Prado NS1100 progress

Progress continues on my Del Prado motorisation project. Today I made up two bogies.

Unpowered bogie

Having settled on only one powered bogie, I decided to tackle the unpowered first. Here is the original del Prado bogie. The wheels were interesting, they sort of rotate, and by that I mean the axles are jammed up solid, but the wheels are such a loose fit on the axles that they still rotate. Not ideal!

So out came the chompers and I stripped the bogies down to just their side frames, which seem quite reasonable. A quick brush with the file to clean them up and we're left with:

I decided that since this bogie would be unpowered, it should be very free rolling, and also have excellent pickup. The other bogie uses wheel-back wipers which aren't known for their reliability or low friction, so this bogie would need to make up for both deficiencies. Enter... pin-point bearings.

I found some spare Atlas loco wheels, and made up some brass strips. I then drilled out the side frames to accept the brass strips:

Now I needed a way of connecting everything together. I decided to make some brass L backets and soldered up two of these:

By topping-and-tailing them, and adding in a styrene-sandwich, plus liberal amounts of superglue, I ended up with:

While at it I added some magnet wire to route the power and drilled a hole for the bolster pin. I then glued the side frames onto the assembly using some PolyZap, a special super glue for delrin and other slippery plastics. Seems to work well.

That's one bogie done, time to tackle the...

Powered bogie

This one was a lot simpler. I just pulled off the old side frames, made up some styrene spacers, and popped the new side frames on:

I had a go at adjusting the wipers to give maximum-wipage with minimum-friction... unsure how successful I was. Pinpoints are definitely the way to go.

Body Modifications

The motor won't fit in the body without a few modifications. First off I had to remove the screw tubes from the roof:

But even that wasn't enough, so I had to remove the window glass too. That's ok, I'll be replacing them anyway.

Now the chassis received some attention, with a nip here and a chop there, it was soon down to size.

I added in the motor which is when I discovered the clearance problems above. It's going to be very tight fit inside with almost no room for a decoder, let alone any additional weight. I had to give up on adding a flywheel as there is no room for one. I don't think this loco will be especially powerful, but that's ok.

I did a test fit of the bogies, chassis, and body:

Coming together nicely! Just missing some couplings and buffers... plus the innards. I plan to replace the pantographs with nice Kato spares, and possibly add some headlights, room permitting!