David's O Scale Blog: O Scale 2R SOU SW1 404

So this project started when I saw on the OGR Forum that SW1 shells were being sold on Ebay. Of course I wanted an SW1, but the MTH didn't have fixed pilots and I do prefer TMCC where possible, so I went ahead and used an AtlasO SW7 I had on hand with the shell as the shell would fit on the chassis.

I first found my prototype photo. From there, I added all of the details that were missing from the shell. I bent my own brass handrails, matching the shape of the shell. I tried to reuse some of the holders from the AtlasO SW shell, but I also ended up using brass coupler lift bar holders from Cal Scale as well. I also bent my own handrails for the side of the shell as the preformed Tichy copper grabs would not fit.

The spark arrest is a combination of 2 aluminum tubes glued together, with a brass wire mesh that was soldered together and glued to the top of the tubing construct. The bottom tube fits snugly to the smoke stack(which I took from an AtlasO stack piece).

The headlight faceplates were from Cal-scale (PSC makes them too) and I had a piece of brass tubing that fit around the faceplate exactly. They were soldered together after I cut the brass tube to what I thought looked good and close to the picture. I ended up making number boards from strip styrene and glued them to the side of the headlight housing.

The cab shell (separate from the body shell) itself was modified in two ways. There was big holes in the rear for whatever MTH used for the rear grab irons to the door. I filled that in with Bondo and drilled new holes in the bondo for the new handrails I formed. I also plugged the hole in the front for the horn and added a brass PSC or P&D 3-chime horn as that is what it looked like in the photo. The interior is a cut-up/modified AtlasO SW interior and is glued to the chassis. The cab shell fits directly over it without any issues.

To mount the shell, I put white paint around the housings on the bottom of the shell and while still wet, I placed the shell down onto the chassis exactly where I knew where I wanted it. This left a residue of the rough area where I needed to drill the chassis to allow me to screw the shell to the chassis. This is seen in one of the photos below.

ERR SC2 and MC2 were used and mounted to the roof of the shell with plenty of room to spare. Unfortunately at the time that I write this blog post, the SC2 has been discontinued. I can only hope ERR brings it back soon. They had quite a few unique sound chips.

The rear hand rails were modified to reflect the picture of the unit I had (and all SW1s I think). I had an extra front-side handrail set where I cut the 2nd post off and made it into a 1-post set.

And a side-note: The SW9 chassis used was an older Dallee, non TMCC system, so I had to buy a new speaker from AtlasO and instead of buying a new TMCC chassis that the parts guy wanted me to use, I instead put electrical tape around the entire compartment of the speaker and I was able to get the speaker to slip down in the fuel tank and then used a rectangular styrene piece to keep the speaker in place. It is a tight fit. Then on the bottom of the fuel tank, I put some extremely tiny, plastic mesh over the hole to keep the speaker magnet from picking up anything major into the speaker and ruining it.