A few years back, I found a Tyco Gerenal kit in mint condition at a good price, so I bought it. I planned to make a whole progress topic, but I got excited and accidentally finished it.
I did my best to make it look as close as possible to the Gerenal’s appearance today with the parts provided.
I couldn’t easily add a light to the solid piece Tyco headlight. So I just painted it.
The brass dome was polished and coated with gloss lacquer, the same as I’ve done with my tinplate restorations. It sure does shine!
A wood load wasn’t included, and I wasn’t about to search all over for the toy-like Tyco piece, so I grabbed a stick from the yard, chopped it up, and glued it on.
The body and details unfortunately aren’t perfectly scaled, so I couldn’t use the Microscale General nameplate decals. Instead, I very, very carefully used Model Master brass paint with a brush.
Instead of the original motor, I used a Maxon coreless motor with a flywheel, cut a longer shaft, and swapped one of the hex couplings for a piece of drive tubing. It runs incredibly smooth and quiet![:D]
I finished this a couple years ago, and just realized I hadn’t even posted it! So here it is (finally).[:D]
4-4-0 Generals don’t do well in my collection. They get sacrificed to provide fodder for other projects. This, plus the tender, is about all that is left of an N scale 4-4-0 that I’m turning into an HOn30 tow motor. Some of you have seen this before:
Should you wish to use this model for something distinctly after the Civil War, the book “Northern Pacific Pioneer Steam Era” has several photos of a group of steam engines remarkably similar. They were built starting 1879. There’s even a shot of one with a cross-compound air pump on its right side, along with a very interesting special appliance. One, anyway, made it to 1905.
Cary made a conversion boiler that was a bit bigger/heavier. It’s on the last page of this document:
4-4-0s are before my period of interest, but there were a bazillion of them over the roughly half-century when they were as common as dirt. This is a partuiicularly beautiful one.[Y][tup]
Always a pleasure to see your videos. That IS a nice running loco. It’s difficult to force myself to really believe that, when the prototype was built, it was pretty much the most technically advance machine in the world. And quite the behemoth. At least, on land.
