1:35 EIMCO 401-216 "Whistling Pig"

[Bernhard]

Hello All
Stuart McPherson (Barney) has invited me to post in this forum after seeing a small article about my EIMCO 401 compressed air trammer in the January newsletter of Lea Bailey Light Railway Society in England.
You can find the whole newsletter here:
http://www.lblr.fod.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Newsletter-January-2019.pdf

After some thought, I decided finally to share my work with you and benefit from your experiences and your feedback.
I live in Switzerland and build fine scale brass models to 1:35 scale running on 16.5 mm track.

[Bernhard]

The first project I will present to you is the EIMCO 401 compressed air trammer, named "Whistling Pig". I found this thing by chance on the internet, and was immediately fascinated by the noise of the air motor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXvZ8luP7js

After some research on the internet I came across the website http://www.narrowgaugechaos.com/RPC/RPC.html with many photos and a dimensioned drawing by Tim Stolle, which I used as a basis for the construction. Since the tank diameter was known (40"), I was able to scale the drawing accordingly and measure out the most important dimensions.

[Bernhard]

To check the proportions I quickly glued together a cardboard model and placed it on my layout. To compare on the right an Orenstein & Koppel MD2.
That fits!

[Bernhard]

As the next step I designed the chassis with the drive and sketched out all details.

Will be continued, after this first appetizer!

[Design-HSB]

Hello Bernhard, welcome and I'm curious to see how it goes.

[finescalerr]

I look forward to the rest of the story. -- Russ

[Bill Gill]

Welcome to the forums, Bernhard. OK, somebody has to ask: Are you going to put a sound decoder into the finished model?

[Chuck Doan]

Very nice work!

[Ray Dunakin]

Welcome aboard! Very nice work on the "Whistling Pig", and what an interesting subject!

Thanks for the video link -- I've seen photos of compressed air locos but never saw one in action until now.

[Lawton Maner]

You do realize that "whistle pig" is a nickname for a woodchuck in some parts of the US?  A great start, I'm looking forward to your progress.

[Bernhard]

Thank you all for your kind welcome to the forum.

Bill,
Of course the model is equipped with a sound decoder! That cost me a lot of time and effort. But more about that later.

[Bernhard]

Here we go!
First of all I have to say that I copied some tricks for milling from Frithjof (fspg2), who has very interesting posts in this forum.

The Frame
An MDF board is used to clamp the two brass sheets for the frame. A precisely fitting pocket is milled into the board and the raw brass sheets are fixed into it with double-sided adhesive tape. So you don't have to worry about the alignment of the parts, and they hold immovably during milling.
You can see the milled bending grooves and the pockets for the axle bearings.
On the right the parts have to be shortened to size. In addition, the holes Ø 0.6 mm for the fastening screws of the axle bearings are still missing.

[Bernhard]

The frame is now soldered together from the two parts

[Bernhard]

Then the floor for the driver's cab is soldered in.

[Bernhard]

The axle bearings are made of Styrene, because they are only dummies.
The front axle bearings can be adjusted with screws to tighten the drive chain.