Hello railroaders,
next week, I’ll go steaming with my Forney for the last time in 2009 and I was thinking about the consist fort his last operation day. Suddenly, I came across with the idea of a snowplow train. Well, I guess I’ll never will need this snowplow for plowing snow, but it’s a great model and I think the whole consist will look very good.
So I dismantled the trucks from my log loader and checked the wheel sets. The axles have been very poor, so I made new ones from ½” round steel. Now they roll very smooth.
The final design of my snowplow was quite clear for a long time… I really like the West Side Lumber Co. =)
The frame was made from 40x50mm bars, screwed together with 6mm truss rods. The bolsters are set into slots just like the prototype.
Click on thumbs for large pictures.
The columns for the plow shield are made the same way as the frame. They plow shield will set to a 45° angle. The read platform will hold a ballast tank. This tanks rests on a ring of wooden bars, screwed to the deck. The tank itself was made from a wooden cage, covered with thin aluminum sheets. The nails represent the rivet detail.
The basic plow shield was made the same way as all other wooden parts before, by setting some bars side by side and hold them together with truss rods. Next I do the details on top of the shield and added two steel girders (one on each side) to support the lip of the plow.
Click on thumbs for large pictures.
One difficult part was the sheet covering of the shield, especially the rounded part. I used to pieces of sheet metal (thin aluminum) and nailed them in place. In this last photo, you can also see the painted ballast tank on the rear, fixed in place with some truss rods. This tank will hold some lead bars once the plow is ready to run.
Still missing are a lot of details like the cover for the tank, girders and supports on the rounded plow part, hand rails, the final plow lip and so on…
But the first step has been gone for my new snowplow =)
Cheers, Gerd
