The Walthers assembly directions have you place the jib on backwards. After looking at several photos and the video of the hulett on youtube, you can see:
The long part of the bucket assembly goes up front,
The crane bucket chains in front of the operator,
Round part of the operator window goes towards the rear!
I already wrote Walthers to let them know.
This is going to be a major pain in the duckass to fix! Because the top ring cover (part #78) is glued to the jib backwards! If you assemble this, please be sure the hole for gooseneck the top ring is on the proper side before gluing it to the ring halves!
So you are building this thing. Does the model slide back and forth on its tracks and raise and lower, or does one have to choose a position to build it into statically?
Well I was having a little debate with Walthers development department on this. They CLAIM that the jib (that arm with the bucket) is supposed to rotate a full 360. So you can simply just turn it around.
Regretably this isn’t so. The way it’s designed, once you glue the ring cap piece on, it can only be rotated roughly ± 45 degrees. Rotate it any more and you’ll snap the ring you glued together. (Ask me how I know.) Plus there’s another part that is designed backwards on the jib, where the goose neck goes in. You’ll need to grab a hobby knife and carve out the other side.
I’ll explain why the jib only rotated ± 45 degres and explicit directions on how to fix it (with pictures) in the steel newsgroup in yahoo. (And yes mine is assembled, and painted.)
The crane bridge (the bottom half) does have free rotating wheels.
The Ore Sled and larry car have fixed wheels that slide on top of track.
The crane has fixed cogs which fit into track teeth. So to move the crame forward/backwards, you have to lift it up slightly to pull the cog out of the track, then put it back down with the cogs fitting back into the track. It takes a little bit of wiggling to get all the wheels on track, and it’s actually a very tight fit.
The boom does go up and down as the ropes are wound on a rotating drum in a wench house at the top back. This shouldn’t be hard to motorize.
The jib rotates left and right (yaw)
The bucket does open and close, but it is a VERY loose fit.
After some more research we have discovered the prototype jib is supposed to rotate 180 degrees to go backwards and forwards.
But with the parts molded as is, you can only rotate the jib ± 45 degrees on the Walthers Model. To get the full rotation possible, you’ll have to hack the collar slot wider on the jib to allow the ring to freely rotate around 180 degrees. (or remove the raised siding underneath the front ring collar) You’ll also need to clear out some plastic on the inside lip for the gooseneck to freely travel through the rotation without binding.
Details with drawings are in the steel newsgroup on yahoo.
Wrong instructions seem to be a small trend of Walthers. On their streamlined GN cars they have lower “L” steps on either the side reversed in the diagram. Basically, you can install it either way, but one way it’s raised and one it’s lowered (proper position for this step). I installed it per instructions on two cars before noticing mistake when looking at the pictures of prototypes. That’s by the way I’m not too crazy about having to install grab irons on Walther’s expensive streamlined cars. But it looks like they don’t have same people who design models writing documentation.
Similar to a problem I found on the instructions for their Concrete Coal Tower (round one 933-3042). Although a very minor discrepancy since it doesn’t operate, the cable routing for the bucket is wrong. The way they show it, there’s no way the bucket could dump into the top of the tower. I had to imagine it, since I couldn’t find any prototype pictures of this type tower.
