Microace D51-51

[Welshbloke]

I've just bought one of these used, but in good condition and boxed. Had to remove a couple of spurious British Railways "unicycling lions" from the tender and a random "13" as well, but it looks right now.

 

A couple of questions though:

 

Should there be some sort of rear body fixing? There's a tab at the front of the chassis which hooks into a slot below the smokebox, but nothing at the back other than friction.

 

Should it have wiring between loco and tender? It has, but it also has contacts in the drawbar which make me wonder whether said wiring is original. It looks ugly and gets in the way of the drawbar, so if it isn't original I'll remove it.

[miyakoji]

The best pic I can find specifically of Microace's D51-51 is this:

 

http://nsteam.sakura.ne.jp/D51/d51n_mace_4b.jpg

 

Unfortunately it doesn't answer your question of about fastening the back end of the body to the chassis, but the linkage between loco and tender is fairly clear, it doesn't look like there's any wiring.  I can see a sort of brass color in there, I assume that's just the link.

[Welshbloke]

Yep, those were the photos I found too.

 

A bit of poking around and I think I've bought a loco converted back from DCC. I've now removed the extra wiring and found that the motor contacts had been cut back, so I repaired them by soldering small lengths of copper strip to press against the chassis halves. It runs fine, just need to get the headlight working again!

 

Edit, fixed the headlight. Turned out that the last owner had cut one of the PCB tracks to isolate it. A bit of solder bridging the gap and all works. Also had to realign one of the axles as the gears were out of sync, so if you tightened the baseplate up properly it would bind. The body seems to be fitting more solidly now the extra wiring is gone. I may have to replace the motor anyway at some point but it's running sweetly for now.

Edited May 29, 2016 by Welshbloke