In a fit of madness a couple of weeks ago I thought that I might have been able to get back to a near-normal lifestyle as our business began to slow just a little. At the same time the scratchbuilding bug bit and along came the latest copy of Narrow Gauge Down Under.
In the magazine was an article on scratchbuilding a four-wheel Class A Climax and it caught my eye. One of those in On30 would look very good running on my yet-to-be-built layout.
Now the Climax is a fairly open locomotive and fitting a motor to such a beast is a bit of a challenge. The author of the article built his with the motor hidden inside the vertical boiler and I was thinking along those lines until I came across this.
Image courtesy of Hollywoodfoundry.com
This is a plan of a new drive system – called the Gurzeler – from the Hollywood Foundry here in Australia. The Hollywood Foundry has a number of drive systems available for model locos at prices that are very reasonable and a visit to their website is not to be missed.
This particular drive system is designed to provide the minimum outline size possible above the floor and the belt drive … something that’s not very common these days … allows for “considerable latitude in your design as the spacing between motor and the translator is not critical, as it would be with gears”.
It certainly looks interesting and one day I may actually get to build the loco and install a drive like this one … but I’m not holding my breath. The slowdown that I mentioned lasted all of 48 hours and now we’re back to working at well-beyond full capacity so the dreams of building and running an A Class Climax have been filed away for another day.
