Last weekend another B’mann 0-6-0 joined the City Belt. My aim is for it to represent WP 161. All the railroads that I’m modeling ran 0-6-0 s in the city before WW II.
The plan is to:
1 Replace the motor with a 5 pole.
2 Convert the tender to oil and have all wheel pickup with kato trucks.
3 Replace the cab with one from a B’mann consolidation.
4 Install dcc.
5 Add led headlights
6 Add appropriate details.
After cleaning the mechanism, I started with the motor. The 3 pole motor was removed. Using the new gear puller it was easy to remove the worm gear for the motor. Then worm was to be pressed on to the 5 pole motor from b’mann. Well one needs to be careful, which I wasn’t. The shaft was bent in a blink of an eye. I had another motor available, and tried again. Pressing against a piece of softwood allowed the shaft to clear the worm so I could position it on the V plate and continue pressing. I’ll try to salvage the damaged motor at some point. Removed the contact strips from the frame to the brushes thus isolating the motor for the dcc decoder.
I’ve gathered most of the components to do this job. Now I’m doing some “demolition”. The cab was chopped off the loco shell and the running boards trimmed to fit the new cab. The tenders coal load was drilled and cut out. #161 is getting kato caboose trucks. The hole in the kato trucks was reamed out to fit over the stock king pins. Slots have been cut in the tender floor for clearance of the electrical contacts on the trucks. The bolster beam on the kato trucks sits higher on the side frames than did the B’mann trucks. This made the tender ride height too high. So the shoulders around the king pin were filed and trimmed back, lowering the tender on to the trucks. The headlights were drilled with a 0.60 mm for the led wires. I may need to hack off the tender coupler pocket to be able to mount a MT 1015.
The target Locomotive.
The Loco
The Tender
Electrical
