A Tribute to Athearn and A Story About Trucks

I received the worm drive assemblies from Athearn shortly after I ordered them even though they tell you it will be 6 weeks for parts delivery. Never more than 10 days. This time the worm drive assemblies were minus the gear box covers. I say that with some trepidation.  In the exploded view of the SD40 parts diagram it shows the covers as part of the "assembly".  I assumed they were.  When they didn't show up I e-mailed Athearn and asked if they were not part and did I need to order them seperately.  They sent me three new covers  with  a note attached saying they were available seperately for $8.95 a dozen and were not part of the "assembly". Thank you Athearn guys. A nice gesture which won't be forgotten.

This first picture shows how much I trimmed the styrene post I previously glued into the truck frame. It is actually flush with the cross member(Bolster).  I am beginning to think this was a mistake in material selection.  This post takes all the stress of draw bar pull and I don't think it will last very long. We'll see. At this point I was concerned about clearances .  As the next photo shows everything worked out just fine but it IS really close under there.  I cleaned up the u-joint castings just to make sure but there is no intereference.

I did have to make a modification to the gear box cover.  It would not snap shut over the gear tower when I installed the truck in the underframe. If you look closely at the two covers side by side you'll notice that the left one is taller.  I took about .010" out of the right hand one.  It then fit just fine and did not interfere with the worm gear . Previously I was concerned with finding a way to keep the trucks held in place with some sort of a clip arrangement.  Well, you can see by the slightly out of focus fourth photo of the truck mounted with the cover in place that the protruding arms do a very nice job of just that. Athearn to the rescue again!!Some surgery has to be done on the deck to allow swing room for the trucks and more room for the drive shaft and flywheels but this was a good day in the history of these models as I am convinced that they are going to run very well and reliably now without too much further problems.  I still have to deal with electrical pick ups but that shouldn't be too much of a problem.....and then the sound systems, of course.  That's a whole new univeerse for me.

The last photo shows the roof master mounted on a 1/8" aluminum plate.  I ran out of similar thickness styrene so I ran out in the shop and hacked this out of some old airplane stuff I had lying around. Aluminum like this (6061T6) is machineable with woodworking tools, I cut it on my table saw, is very stiff in this thickness and I can debond it if I really want to after I'm done with it . It should make an excellent base for casting. I'm still tinkering with the master, filling small holes and such.  As you can see, all the warp has been removed by bonding it to the plate with CYA.