I got my orders from BrickLink on Friday, but didn’t get a chance to build until Sunday night. I spent $123 on parts and of course I forgot a few things.
The last time that I worked on the engine I toyed with the idea of changing the cylinder design since I am just not that happy with how they look when compared to the prototype. I had replace one of cylinders as an experiment.
Last night I had to tear apart the pilot truck to replace some parts with the correct color so that led me to work some more on the cylinder design. This is actually my original design before I ended up going with a variation of Tony Sava’s design.
I actual like this design better, I think that it looks more prototypical and I really like the piston rod moving in and out of the cylinder (technic brick). I think this looks more realistic. Of course there is a problem. The pilot truck will not move around this cylinder, it is just too big. The only solution would be to spread the pilot trucks wheels apart even further so they would, but they are already farther apart than they should be so I really cannot do that.
So after wasting over an hour, I put the original cylinders back on. Luckily I didn’t destroy them so it wasn’t that hard. The hardest part was getting the front end attached again since I did have to rework it slightly to get it to attach over the new cylinders.
So needless to say, I didn’t get too far due to the wasted time. I did swap out a lot of parts that were wrong before so the engine looks a little better now. I think that I have enough pieces to do all of the detailing under the boiler so that will be my next task. The cab also needs rework since I threw it together with what few dark blue pieces I had laying around.
