Uh oh! Right, so lets backup here, what's going on? Well, I like Shays, I mean who doesn't? I really only model in N scale though, and I don't even have an HO layout. I do own a Broadway Limited HO Consolidated that that I only run a few times a year on a friend's layout. However I really wanted to try my hand at building a locomotive kit, and I knew of these old MDC/Roundhouse Shays. I mean really old for me, heh, I was 7 years old when this kit first came out! I looked around a bit, and found out that Wiseman Model Services still sell these kits. I also knew some sort of Handbook existed that went into great detail about how to build this kit, and that it was folly to build one without the book. This was a few months ago when I first learned of this, and I looked for a used copy. However, I don't care how much of a "bible" that book could be to modelers, I was not prepared to pay the going price! However, digging through the internet, I did come across a post from the author saying he wanted to release a third edition. Oh! well then, let's wait for that I thought. A few weeks ago, I'm waiting on my daughter to finish her swim training, and decide to just browse through a forum. Very first post at the top was an update by the author of "The MDC Shay Handbook" saying it was out! I go to his website, and immediately ordered a copy. Only after did I realize that the post had been posted about 2 minutes earlier! I've since ordered not one, but TWO MDC Shay kits, a Two-Truck and Three-Truck version, and some companion books on the used market (and these at a normal price for used books)! I found an old school binder, cleaned it up a bit, and put the kit instructions into that. You don't get the original Roundhouse booklet with the kit, but instead what appears to be photocopies of the book. The photos are not well reproduced, but everything else that's really important is line drawings that are perfectly readable. In any case, if I did need a picture, there are old scans of the original booklets found online. At the top is the three books I bought. The spiral-bound "The MDC Shay Handbook", and two old copied of the Shay Modelers Handbooks (again, these were published 40 years ago)! Blue for the two-truck version, and Red for the three-truck. The MDC Shay handbook mentions them for super-detailing the shays. They were a fun read. The red book is bigger and much much more useful. As for the kits themselves, they came into two little recycled blue boxes (one which used to contain Speculums apparently). That box is barely big enough for the kit, so I transferred everything into a spare parts box. The kit itself is mix of original parts and some upgrades. For example, the kit comes with a Mabushi can motor, and the frame itself is an "upgrade" that doesn't need special work to fit this motor. And of course, up above is the requisite photo of the kit all spread out onto the table . The little pill boxes are not included in the kit, it's just my silly want to organize things. Plus, a lot of the black plastic parts fell off the parts sprues in shipping and handling, so best not to lose them. I'm still waiting for some parts in the mail. I've since ordered some upgrade parts from NWSL. Specifically, I ordered the Bull Gear upgrade kit and both the two-truck and three truck partial re-gear kits, and new universal drive-line coupling kits. For the motor, I also ordered flywheels of the appropriate size. So there you have it, start of something new. I have no experience what-so-ever building locomotive kits, but here goes a kit build "for the advanced modeler only"! I should be starting this kit build either this week or the next (waiting for the last parts ot arrive). No idea how long it'll take me, but this hobby isn't a race!
This should be exciting. There was a fellow in my train club (who has now sadly departed) who had one of these 3-truck Shays that he'd turned into an absolute masterpiece. It looked great and ran like a Swiss watch. So the potential is there!
That's what I like about it. No deadlines, no pressure, no one over my shoulder, etc. In my bubble, with no other care in the world. Make the fun last! Good luck on your build and we'll all be eagerly awaiting your progress reports - at your pace, of course.
Ah ha! the first update! I'm still waiting for my NWSL upgrade kits, and since the frame and gear box are the first things to be worked on, I'm a bit stuck while I wait for the mail. I can still work on preparing the pieces though, and what better than starting with the actual frame... This is my first time working with white metal. Well, alright, actually this is my first time working with any metal kit. I looked throughout my tools and found a bunch of different files, wet/dry sandpapers and sanding sticks and came up with pretty much what you see here. However I really only used a small subset - the bulk of the work was with the biggest file on the left. A lot of finishing was with the wet/dry sand papers (320 and 400 grit), and sanding sticks (240 grit and 400 grit). The pile of red handled files and everything to the right of those I didn't even use at all. Hmm, actually not pictured is both an Exacto blade that I found can cut off some of the more annoying flash, and a Dremel to grid away a few hard to reach flash. So what's it look like? see below! I tried to smooth out the sides and the top as much as possible, except for the bits I knew would be perfectly hidden. As for the bottom, yes I left most of the casting circles, but that's underneath and won't be visible really. I guess this would be unacceptable to those that like things like the highly detailed underbodies of Rapido passenger cars, but for me, the underside is only seen when sometimes goes horribly wrong Both ends were also ground down and filed until the plastic pilots fit well and left no gaps. I'll show a picture of that once I also clean up the pilots and get them looking presentable.
A few more little bits done, Cleaned up and fitted the end beam pilots. Mostly just removing flash and trying to clean up the dings. I find that a lot of the plastic bits have dings and scratches from the way they are packaged unfortunately. I suppose during shipping the heavier metal pieces shifted around and hit the plastic. Should be fine in the end, I'm sure the 1:1 shays ended up dinged up quite heavily over time. Cleaned up the inside of the gearbox of any and all burrs and mold flashing. The Handbook says to use a bamboo stick and glue a small bit of 400 grit sandpaper to clean up the inside. I decided to do just that, but with a battery operated Dremel at low speed. I also did all of the sanding wet. Started with 400, then went to 800, 1500 and ended with 3000 grit sand paper. I used a hot glue gun for the sand paper - I'd cut a rough circle, put a dab of glue on the stick end, and then press it down to the sand paper dot. The result is quite smooth, and I'm looking forward to getting the gears to try it out. But the silly package is stuck in California somewhere, tracking says its been in the same place since the 19th!
I can't understand how you've got a Shay kit and are not working on it! No real update today, just a couple boxes that unexpectedly showed up today... Got my box of NWSL upgrades including the gear puller tool that seemed like a good idea. Its a lot of parts, but it's for both the two and three truck Shays. That's right, so if I mess up the two truck, I can go ahead and try and mess up the three truck build too Then the other package was a set of miniature reamers. Holy cow those are difficult to find! I mean it should have been easy, seeing how Micromark sells some, but they are perpetually out of stock on that. So I found some on Amazon. However, the set they sent me were not 5-sided reamers, but instead perfectly smooth. Smoothing broaches is what they are called. Plus, the little plastic case looked like it had been dragged across a warehouse floor underneath something heavy. My fault, had I zoomed in real close to the pictures I would have seen it was the wrong thing. So decided to keep those as being my fault. Then ordered Cutting broaches from the same Amazon third party seller, and this time the pictures clearly showed that the tools had several "sides". But man, they sent me the SAME thing, just the sticker on the back said Cutting broaches instead of Smoothing broaches. Well, I decided to keep those and returned the ones with the damaged vinyl case. I'm okay with keeping one set as "my fault" for not looking at the item closely, but that second set was their fault. I just decided to keep the nicest ones Okay, so these that are finally real Miniature Reamers I was able to find in some hardware store in California. They were the best price + shipping I could find. Sheesh are these things rare!
Best of luck! I built several of the MDC kits 30+ years ago and they could be great locomotives. Take your time, patience is a necessity with these kits.
On a good day, when it runs, it sounds like a coffee grinder. When that blasted fake drive shaft gets stuck, it just hums... I'll take the coffee grinder any day. At least I know it's running.
I've seen all the reports of this kit being noisy, and well, that's alright. I'll do my best to reduce that, but if it runs smoothly and noisily, I'll be happy! So today I finished the gearbox! I pretty much followed the instructions in the Handbook, using both the two-truck and three-truck sections. See, the way the Handbook is setup is that the two-truck Shay is built using original kits parts (minus the electrical pickup strips), while the three-truck section uses all of the upgrade parts. Previously I had done a lot of the sanding of the interior of the gearbox halves, and today was smoothing the NSWL gears. For this I used the tricks found in both the Handbook and the regular instructions. Below you can see the piece of wood I used to sand the gear faces. I stuck 600, 1500 and 3000 grit wet/dry on the the wood with some super77, drilled out some holes, and then spun the gear faces on this, with the sandpaper wet. Seems to have done good. (huh I hadn't noticed that one hole was a bit blackened, wet paper might have dried out a bit on smoothing the bullgear on the 3000 grit) The two smaller gear axles were very tight in the gearbox, and so I took out the new reamers and.... oh crap, the reamers are too small for 3/32" axles, LOL so much trouble searching high and low for these things and they're not even useful. In the end I very very carefully used a square file to spin out the axle holes. It worked, and I think I did a good job. The gears spin very well, and there's definitely no binding or any catching of the gears. I held onto the power shaft (top gear) with a pin vise and was able to easily spin the gearbox around and around. Next steps should be to mount the motor, so I should see very quickly whether it's good to go. As for the bottom cutout on the gearbox exposing the drive gear, this is something that the Handbook suggests. Apparently the gearbox sits low enough to catch on frogs and the like. It was actually a bit difficult to do. The book seems to show just slicing it off with an #11 blade, but the engineering plastic of the gearbox is super tough. After cutting one side, I just used wet 600 grit sand paper to slowly grind away the bottom, then switched to 1200 grit to finish it off. All good in the end. II can be a bit impatient, but I keep hearing this about this kit, and I'm really trying to take it to heart! You know, it took me about two and a half hours just working the gears, gearbox cutout and assembling it all. With a bit of background music, it's enjoyable!
The handbook suggests only meshing one gear per truck to the drive shaft to help with better running. I'm far from that point yet on these MDC Shays, but it makes sense to me. I own two N scale Atlas Shays, and both would bind up on curves. I was looking at the mechanism and figured that there was no reason to have both the front AND rear trucks driving the single driveshaft, so I moved the gear on one truck so that it would no longer engage the wheel. Solved it immediately, both Shays are running smoothly now, and the driveshaft is fully animated. I think it was the rearmost wheel that I disengaged, was the easiest.
Ah! That's the general direction my tinkering was going. It ran better once I disconnected one truck, but not optimally. So I really was on the "right track"! I copied your reply into my Excel "work order" sheet. Thanks!
Hmm, okay, so I haven't done much except ponder how to move forward. First, I wanted to install the gearbox to the frame in preparation of hooking up the motor, which is one of the next steps in the kit build. So the kit supplies four of these #2 - 3/16" self-tapping screws that serve to attach the gearbox, and later the engine to the frame. Instructions are clear about using the self-tapping ability to tap them into the frame. Well, that won't work, the screws drop right into the holes! I understand that the kit has "evolved" over time, but Wiseman's should possibly update his hardware to match the new kit contents. In this case, if I understand the Wiseman portion of the kit instructions, the frame is provided by Wiseman's, and not an original MDC part. On the original frame, there would be two ridges in the back to cradle to the motor, which do not exist here to accommodate the flat can motor instead. Ok, so not really a lot of trouble, I mean the provided screws didn't seem that good anyway, so I had planned to replace them. So I ordered a kit of 2-56 and 4-40 screws of various lengths, which should be delivered tomorrow. Lucky I already own a 2-56 and 4-40 taps from my days of radio control airplane kit building. Okay, so I just used another #2 bolt and nut to temporarily attach the gearbox to the frame, just to do some additional head scratching... So here's the motor that's supplied with the kit, and the temporarily attached gearbox. And for good measure, that's the flywheel I bought for the motor. So, first thing, I am going "off-script" for the motor installation. Basically, I have three entirely different sets of instructions for the motor installation. The original MDC kit instructions for a round can motor, that needs the "rails" that should be on the frame, and that is screwed to the frame from below. Obviously I don't have the kit components for this installation, so out the window. The Handbook suggests using a 16x31 Sagami motor (whatever that is) that also uses the rails. They also show various different installations in a sidebar using various other motors,. none of which are pertinent here. The Wiseman addendum sheet that came with the kit for the motor that is included in the kit, and pictured here. They suggest gluing the motor down with silicone and using a piece of tubing to hook up the motor shaft to the gearbox. So I'm going to use Wiseman's kit motor, but not the tubing. Instead of the tubing, I bought a universal coupling (ball and socket) kit and a 2mm shaft, which is how I'll hook it up. Glad I did because the motor sits every so slightly higher than the gearbox shaft. I don't have the tools to mill the frame down so the motor sits lower, but I will have the dremel a grove for the flywheel. So now, I have to figure out how far back I want the motor, and that's another head scratcher. The Coupling needs at least 14mm, but I believe that's overall length (socket to socket). However I have the Truck bolster pin hole that I don't really want to cover up... see below... I also have to think about leaving room inside the back for a decoder, though I think I will use a LokSound Nano, which I already have ready, I have plans to hide the speaker in the cab itself, should be plenty of room and help hide the motor and universals. Now both the Handbook and the kit don't seem at all concerned about putting the motor right on top of that bolster pin hole (just don't forget to put the pin), but with having to silicone the motor in place, I'm just not sure. Lucky I think the Nano will fit right to the side of the motor, or failing that, in back. And below, you can see how it would look if I don't cover the pin, with the back and and the cab in place. Okay, so it's a long post that shows no progress, just brainstorming hehe! Also, what sort of silicone "glue" should I use? just the stuff for bathroom sinks for example? Would there be something easily accessible in a hardware store? Any thoughts on covering that pin or not?
I like the way you are planning ahead. I would think that the bathroom silicone glue would work fine.
Looking good - As for gluing the motor down - you may want to use E6000 - this stuff is amazing. Best regards, Wolf
Well, thank you everyone for your kind words, I'd really digging this build, and so far everything seems to be going well! So today was the gearbox and motor installation! I started by reducing the length of the shaft bit a few millimeters... I was trying to figure out how to protect the motor, and in the end, I'm really kind of stupidly proud of how I did it . I just poked a tiny hole in a small parts bag, and the poked the shaft out, instant protection! No metal shavings are gonna get into the motor that way. And to chamfer the end of the shaft, I just hooked the motor up to my Kato power pack and spun it up, wet sanding the end. That allowed me to install the flywheel onto the motor. Not particularly difficult, just tricky. It's a press fit, but very tight. So I used a bench vise and just squeezed one onto the other. Sorry, no pictures of that, I only have the two hands . That does make the motor assembly wider, so I had to ground out a recess into the frame to allow clearance for the flywheel. For this I used a Dremel and a sanding drum. I thought it would be easier, but it's not easy at all making a clean depression. In my mind I was going for a nice crescent like at the front of the frame, but reality soon kicked in! Ok, it's not going to be seen, it's alright! Next step was to install the slotted cups onto each of the shafts, one on the motor, barely visible inside the flywheel hole - that's why I anted to cut the shaft, it barely pokes out. Then three on the gearbox. These are a super tight fit, and my fingers hurt a bit. Some I was able to use the bench vise to press them in, others I had to do by hand. And voila! Up above you can find all of the parts ready to go. I tapped the frame for 2-56, and installed the gearbox with the 2-56 screws I received today. The metal shaft was cut to size, and the little dogbone bits pressed on. In the end, the motor will indeed sit on top of the bolster pin, but I found a way to protect it. Unfortunately no pictures. But first, videos! I just tapped the motor to the frame, and hooked up my Kato power pack. I think the gearbox runs smoothly enough, however I see that the bullgear starts rattling quite badly when it gets up in speed (close to full power). I did try an experiment however, see in this next video... See, if I apply even light pressure on the drive cups, the sound goes away and I find the gearbox isn't too noisy. I mean it's noisy, no doubt about it, but acceptable. I can also run it real slow, and there's zero binding, so I'm happy with that. Maybe the sound will come down a bit more once I oil/grease the gearbox, but that's not until the very last step of the full build. Okay, so not pictured is that I did glue the motor to the frame. Turns out my daughter had a tube of E6000, I never used the stuff myself before today, but she uses it for applying decorations to her synchronized swimming suits. So thank you for the suggestion, the stuff looks like it will work perfectly, I'll know tomorrow when it's fully cured! As for the bolster pin, well, I used a hole punch, and punched out a small circle of self adhesive vinyl (the sign making stuff). I used a bar of soap to slick up the top of the pin, and covered the bolster hole that will be under the motor with the circle of vinyl (I wish I had taken a picture! ooops!) Hey, this way the bolster pin won't stick to the vinyl, and the glue won't gum up the bolster pin. So should work. Everything is clamped up now, and I'll see tomorrow how well it stuck. Have a great Easter weekend!
The E6000 adhesive cured, and the motor is well and truly bonded to the frame. Should work fine, and I think I'll have enough space in the back for a decoder, and who knows, maybe even a small speaker. This thing is gonna be noisy as heck, so not sure I really need the engine sound, but having the whistle and the bell will be nice to have. At this point I'm skipping a lot of the detail pieces. For example, the kit instructions would have me install the air cylinder and the front and rear pilots. However I'm going to wait a bit for those. First, I need stanchions for the pilots and the ones that came with the kit are white metal and terriblly malformed. So I ordered some brass replacements. I thought I might receive them before the long weekend, but seems no, I'll have to wait for the next. I am also opting not to install any of the power pickups on the frame because of the whole DCC thing. Normally the two big holes in the frame are supposed to be filled with insulating bushings, brass bolts and a metal "bridge". The frame itself would serve as one power pickup. Instead, I'm just going to run wires from the trucks directly to the decoder. More on that in a much later post. For now, I decided to tackle the trucks, but first, an issue with the wheels. Two of the wheels, one geared and the other not, are in a bad shape - melted plastic and all. Not easy to see on the geared wheel, but the axle hole itself is sorta melted. A bit bummed about this, but I'm going to defer the problem to the three-truck Shay - I just opened the three-truck Shay kit and swapped out the wheels. I do want to order log car kits eventually, and when I do, I suppose I'll order a new wheel set. After cleaning up the rest of the wheels, I started assembling them. I've never had a gear puller before, but turns out it's quite a nifty little tool. For N scale, I'm used to just twisting and pulling/pushing to get wheels in gauge, but this is nice. It took me some time to get used to it, but in the end I was getting quite good as making adjustments! I used the small Dremal to hold the jackshaft and did a lot of cleaning up and deburring that way, and then did a lot of the cleaning and deburring of the truck parts as per the instructions in the Handbook. Below you can see that I also added thrust washers to the geared side of the wheel sets. It's an improvement mentioned in the Handbook, and both reduces side to side slop as well as keeping the gear meshed at a constant distance. And the basic truck is completed! They do appear to be smooth as this point - I can grab the jackshaft by the socket and turn the wheels a full revolution both forwards and in reverse and I'm not feeling any resistance of anything catching at any point. The wheels don't have much play side to side, and neither does the jackshaft (end to end). Still, the whole thing seems a bit loose, but then I'm used to N-scale, not sure if HO has just more play between parts. I still have 0.05mm thickness thrust washers that I can use to tighten things up a little more, but I'll try running it a bit first. Though I may have to take it apart again, I think the holes on top, for the bolster pins, might be much much too tight. I think the next part is building the pickup strips. The Handbook suggests using some pickup strips from a company that is basically out of business. Instead I bought a sheet of K&S 0.003" Phosphor Bronze, and will try making my own strips. The Handbook suggests 0.008" sheet from Clover House, but I can't find that anywhere. Hopefully 0.003 isn't too thick.
