Hey everyone, just wanted to document here what I did to improve the headlight on a Bachmann Spectrum HO scale 3-Truck 80-Ton Shay I own. This process could be applied to the rear light too but for now I just did the headlight since that is what I see most often.
I have owned this Shay for a number of years now. Got it back in 2015 I think off eBay. It had the typical Bachmann split gear issue and could only propel itself on 2 out of the 6 axles. Barely enough to get itself moving. So the first upgrade was swapping out the drive line with the replacement driveline Bachmann sells on their parts website. Glad they make those and improved the plastic since the NWSL metal gear replacement seems like a tough job!
I later went on to upgrade the decoder to a Soundtraxx Econami and it overall looks and sounds good, except for those terrible square headlights. What the model does is it has a light bulb down inside the boiler and it uses a square plastic channel to relect the light up and forward out of the headlight housing, but rather than use a round piece of plastic they chose a square one. So I decided to finally bite the bullet and fix the issue. Here is a before and after.
So first you want to follow the instructions on this website to disassemble the locomotive: http://gearedsteam.blogspot.com/2012/06/bachmann-spectrum-shay-disassembly.html
Next, you want to follow these instructions I got from a guy on Facebook who had done it already, his advice was awesome:
1.The headlight housing is glued to the top of the smoke box on a little headlight stand. You need to pry the headlight off, but not the stand.
- Get the smoke box cover off. It