The Home Machinist!

My passion over the many years has been to have a close representation of the Southern Ps4. The first thing I did was to get the prints and visit the Smithsonian Museum of American history. Wow, it has been a long journey. It was 10 years before I pulled my first train on a club track. I did make so...

Hello Fred, the Clippard Minimatics makes the valve and it is small and more to scale. It is about 5/8" x 1/2" . If you go online to the company Clippard Minimatics and put in MAV-3 in their search engine the valve will pop up and you can look at it. The valve is a 3 way valve to drain off...

I installed a spring to pull the doors shut after operating the butterfly doors on air/steam. The doors tended to stick open after operating without the spring. I installed a 1/8" air line to the butterfly doors operating cylinder. Between the air/steam supply and the operating cylinder I insta...

With the Little Engines valve gear the slide valve is adjusted to cover the port at front dead center or back dead center. Full forward or full reverse at front dead center and back dead center will produce no valve motion.

Let me correct myself, with the locomotive at front or back dead center of piston travel, there is no motion of the valve stem when the locomotive is put in reverse or forward. This is when the crank is set correctly. I misstated there was no motion of the valve stem when the piston was at the cente...

I have a Little Engines Pacific and this how I set my timing. First the eccentric crank must be set. With the piston in the dead center of travel and the eccentric crank set correctly there will be no slide valve travel from full reverse to full forward. With the eccentric crank set we leave the loc...

Wow, all the good advice. Let me explain the process I used that has lasted for thirty years to be more "clear". I cut and punched my springs. On my top spring I roughed it up. When I roughed it up all the blueing was "GONE" in the joint area and I had a clean metal to use my 45%...

I used 45% silver solder on my LE Pacific leaf springs. I made sure to rough up the area on the spring leaf to get a good joint. My springs had an oily film on them so a good cleaning was in order. It has been over 30 years ago that I did the job and all is still good and solid.

I have been reading this discussion about some folks using the LE parts to build a Southern Ps4. I am one who built a locomotive using the LE parts. There is one big difference in how I built my engine. When I could, I cast parts to put on my engine to get away from the LE design. For instance, I bu...

The subject were are trying to resolve is the suspension on the drivers of a Little Engines Atlantic or Pacific. If one follows the plans to a science there can be serious traction issues due to half of the locomotives weight resting on the trucks. My Pacific (4-6-2) had a great bit of weight on the...

John, I have sent a Pm on what I did to correct the problem. Lets get off this forum.

For those with a LE Atlantic or Pacific locomotive I found a good solution for me. It goes back to the fulcrum that Dan Watson spoke about. The problem was to get the weight reduced on the trailing truck and the leading truck. If you follow the LE plans to the letter, half of the weight is applied t...