del prado

NS 1100 gets a new motor

My Del Prado plastic magazine-loco kitbashing continues...

A long while ago I bought a bunch of motors on eBay, with the intention of using them for various loco motorisation projects. Most were quite small, however one was big and beefy with good low speed characteristics, and I thought that would be ideal for re-motorising my Del Prado NS 1100 loco.

I had previously used a not-very-amazing Life-Like motor and chassis to power the model, however the Life-Like motor was showing its age. It's bit, open sided, and only 3 pole, so it just didn't give the kind of low-speed performance I wanted from my model. Here is what it looked like:

Now for some reason I decided to replace the motor yesterday. First problem is that the repl...

NS1100 Del Prado gains some couplings

A quick update on my Del Prado loco from the Netherlands (not Norway as I originally thought... they both start with N!)

We have couplings!

I differed from the original model here a little by attaching the buffer beams and couplings to the bogies, but apparently this is how the real locos did it too, so really, I'm making things more realistic! I did it this way as there just wasn't room to have them mounted to the body and still have the bogies rotate.

Fitting the couplings was easy enough, I just used my trusty razor saw to cut out a box, filed it to size, and fitted a coupling. A lump of styrene on the top helps secure things. Everything was glued together with Polyzap, since the coupler boxes are some kind of slipper engineering plastic and are hard to g...

Del Prado NS1100 nearly finished

Progress continues on my Del Prado motorization project. It's nearly finished!

Adding Weight

I was a bit worried that the poor thing, with only one motor bogie, wouldn't be able to pull much. So I decided to add some weight. First step was to make up a sacrificial master out of polystyrene. With some careful trimming and cutting, I soon had a weight that fitted nice and snugly over the gearbox and universal.

Polystyrene isn't known for its weighty properties, so I needed to convert it into something a little heavier. My old stand by, white metal, sounded like just the trick. So I made up a mold from some scraps and mixed up some clay and water to make a mold. Here is my fairly crude mold, with the sacrificial po...

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:

Motorising a del Prado NS1100

A new project has landed on my workbench this week. A while ago while idly surfing around I discovered the "del Prado" range of diecast collectable trains. These were produced for a Spanish magazine, one of those ones where every week it comes with a new "limited edition" collectable on the cover and before you get a chance to cancel the subscription the next one is already on your doorstep. Anyway, the del Prado models are quite crude and very cheaply made, but they are mostly to scale and available fairly cheaply on the second hand market. So I did a bit of hunting and ordered a few that I liked the look of.

Today the package arrived and I excitedly opened them up, expecting the worst. To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised. I ordered three models, one each of a German, Swiss, and Dutch electric loco. Sounds like the beginning of a railfan joke. I decided to tackle the Dutch loco first, as it's really quite cute.