Lil Big Haulers, Adding Big Hauler pistons and siderods to the Bee

[vic]

Lil Big Hauler Bumble Bee Loco, adding Big Hauler pistons kitbash. Got this a while ago , time to finally get around to modifying my LBH engines, I decided to start with the Bee version first, here are the results, Big Hauler (BH) pistons mounts cut and shaped to fit the slots from the stock piston mounts:









The stock BH pushrods were then cut down and mounted back onto the sliders with a micro nut and micro bolt and some very small washers between the moving parts, I locked the nut with a little tiny dab of CA. The trickiest part was fixing the pushrod to the wheel, I ended up searching for a long enough bolt that was just large enough to thread into wheel's mounting hole for the plastic siderod locking pin. I used a styrene tube spacer to fill in the opening space in the pushrod. More pics to come, I have since added water feed lines to each side of the boiler, a more complete looking backhead, an air brake compressor pump and storage tanks, a new BH bell that luckly fit into the left over opening after I cut the bell off, link/pin couplers from and rear, and stirrups and grab bars to the tender. Certainly looks better, even if the pistons are a tad larger than I would have liked, but you use what you got. Will be doing the same treatment to the Saddletanker one of these days. PS you WILL need a Dremel or some sort of tool to do the cutting efficiently, it could be shaped with a razorsaw and xacto blades, but it would be tedious work.



Finished my bash: Added air compressor/tanks, spark arrester, backhead details, tender steps and grab bars













Added other various Big Hauler bits, Finished.

[NarrowMinded]

Nice work,
Thanks for posting these pictures, I was getting ready to cut up a side dump car to make a tender for a project I have been working on, But seeing the Lil hauler tender has changed my direction.

I'm going to order one of these use the tender and that will leave me with a nice base to build a little diesel.

NM-Jeff

[on30gn15]

Safe to declare "the sky's the limit" on what can be done with/to these little jokers?