Ray Wells and I attended the RPM meet in St Louis last weekend, great show if you ever have the opportunity to attend one you should by all means, they are some of the best shows you will ever attend. I took some passenger cars and a Toby finished with the recent steam passenger decal set. I numbered it as the 1519 as I had seen the prototype out in Enid not that long ago. Although it's not anywhere near one of Don's projects, can any of you other foam heads tell me what two details were changed to make it a more correct 1519 as opposed to a stock Toby? Brad Slone
Brad - Nice work! A couple of answers and a thought regarding your questions: My answers - the two main things you changed were the #2 driver going to a Scullen disc, and the wide diameter smokebox door, both not on the Toby. My thought - did you measure the location of the two top air tanks? They were in a slightly different position atop the boiler verses the later 1520 series class. I have forgotten the difference - either slightly more forward than the 1520's, or slightly more aft. Don and I both missed the tank location on my second Toby he did for me ..... as SLSF 1519. We decided not to change it, as the difference was slight, and 99.44% of the time not noticed. Karl has it now. Ken
Ken, Right out of the box! I didn't figure it would give folks much trouble, but I thought I could get more than an hour out of it! Ken is correct I changed the smoke box and the 2nd driver. I didn't go to the trouble to adjust the top mounted air tanks, I couldn't justify the work for such a small difference. Good answers Ken! Brad
Brad - I'll admit it, I had an advantage as Don and I talked a lot about what to do to my second Toby to turn it into 1519. (The first one was 1522) We decided to do the wide smokebox door, but to leave the 2nd driver unchanged as the thing was to be in its early years. We both overlooked the tanks until the model was essentially done. Don was willing to start over and fix it, but I said no way, as the thing is beautiful as it was, and nobody would know the slight difference in tank location. Other than to tell Karl about it when I sold 1519 to him some time ago, this is the first time I have mentioned widely that the air tanks on 1515-1519 are slightly in a different location than on 1520-1529. Ken
BOY, KEN ... That's REALLY Nit Pickin! Oh the horrors of Don making a Boo Boo! I admire you guys greatly for being so fastidious. Wonderful work, Brad.
Splendid looking old bird, Brad. How'd you go about fabricating the Scullin disc drivers? That's one that's always intrigued me. Best Regards,
Thanks for the compliments guys, but the Japaneses did most of the work, I only tweaked it and give it a paint job. I took the simple approach for the Scullins driver, Don has told me that Bowser makes an appropriate version but that the axles are different sized. So, since I don't have a lathe to turn down the axle I took the approach of an overlay. I drew out a .010 styrene disk that would fit inside the tires of the existing driver. Next I laid out the circle pattern as well as the center hub and drilled out all 5 holes. The styrene is so thin you have to be real careful drilling otherwise the hole will tear out. Next I laid out the crescent of the counterbalance and cut it out. The tricky part is gluing the overlay onto the driver, I must admit this part made me the most nervous, because if you mess up the driver a replacement would be hard to come by. With it in place I glued on the counterbalance and painted them. Upon close inspection it's not nearly as nice as a one piece cast unit, but with the rods back in place a lot of it is covered at any given time and with it running you cant tell a difference. Brad
I took a look tonight at pics of the 1515 series Mountains and the 1520 series Mountains we have posted in the archive. The several profile or near profile pics of these two classes of Frisco steam excellence clearly show the top mounted air tanks on the 1520 series are mounted several inches further aft than are the tanks on the 1515 series. Wonder why they did that? Ken
1500-1519 Ctr Line of the stack to the Ctr Line of the sand dome = 9'-6 1/4" 1520-1529 Ctr Line of the stack to the Ctr Line of the sand dome = 6'-7"
Looks pretty good by my poor eyes, even when sitting still, Brad. Thanks for the details on the construction. Best Regards,
My dad and I were at that meet as well Brad. I saw this in person and it looked very nice. It sucks going to those places where nobody knows who each other is. We need name tags with our online AKA's.
I did mine a little differently. I didn't put a Scullin main on it and removed the booster. This backdated it a bit which is what I was after. Thinking I should have made a set of Volotone air horns for the smokebox.
No harm, no foul with this omission, Don. The steam whistle-only represents the natural order of things.
