SW-7 Mods

[jonathan]

Folks, I'm helping out graywolf with an article he wanted to share. Hope this works:

Here are 2 photos of my SW7 switcher which has been causing me trouble because it is so light. Most of the time, it had difficulty going over switches that didn't have power to the frog or some areas of track that were not perfectly spotless. The situation was the fact that it weighed only 9 ounces. I could help it along by placing my finger on top to give it better contact. I tried many things such as cleaning the wheels and even cleaning the track in front of it as it ran along. I powered all the frogs that seemed to be causing the problem. Finally, I decided to remove the shell to see if I could add weight inside. That was hopeless because it was so stuffed with gear and electronics. The engine is only 6 inches long.

The next step was to see if I could add weight externally and also justify the act of doing so and still have realism. I found some new brass toilet bolts in my junk box that weighed in at almost 3 ounces. As you can see, those are now sitting on top of the engine. I cut the heads off the bolts,but didn't want to lose the weight. So I decided to use the heads to bind the threaded parts of the bolts around the exhaust stacks. I glued the heads to the bolts from below using hot glue. I painted them black to blend in and sat them on top. They added 2.85 ounces to the engine and made a big difference in operation.

Now I had to justify what I did to the model train world. In keeping with the current state of the world regarding Covid-19, I rationalized that the engine was assigned the task of moving refrigerated cars which carried the vaccine from place to place. So therefore what you see on top of the engine are the cooling coils for the refrigeration system that was retrofitted to the engine to make things happen. Case closed.   Paul Case   

01A by Jon Vogel, on Flickr

01B by Jon Vogel, on Flickr

[Len]

There are a number of sites that offer cardstock buildings in mulitiple scales. Some are free, some are not, but once you download the file from the pay sites you can make as many copies as you want. And they are realatively easy to modify.

Even if the site only offers one scale, it's a straightforward matter of adjusting the scaling on your printer to 87% to change an OO building to HO.

One good site for US buildings is: https://www.modelbuildings.org/
Most of these are OO scale, so set the printer scale to 87% for HO scale.

There are a number of sites offering UK style buildings, which are handy for 'Thomas' layouts.
I really like Scale Scenes at: https://scalescenes.com/
Be aware most of these are designed for European size A4 paper and cardstock, available from Amazon and other places. If reduced for HO scale, standard letter size paper and cardstock can be used.

There are also a number of sites offering free brick, stone, shingle, etc., sheets for 'design your own' buildings.

Len