Mike, What a tremendous accomplishment! Building one of those kits is as close to scratchbuilding as you can get, and you added many scratchbuilt parts, too. The mechanism appears to run very smoothly. The SSL&S Pacific that I built years ago never ran well, so I ditched it.
Thanks for sharing all the photos as you went along: a lot of extra work for our enjoyment! Roger Nulton From: Mike S Sent: Friday, August 02, 2013 11:24 AM To: [email protected] Subject: {S-Scale List} Mopac 1414 is getting off the work bench For those that have been following my build. The day has come for that first ever run around the layout. This was the first ever run on rail and my heart was in my throat. The layout is in it's last stages and I have had stuff hit the concrete in the past. We will be selling the house in the spring of next year so this layout will be gone sometime this winter. As you all know I started this loco back in January and my goal was to finish by June. Well that did not happen. At this time August 1st the soldering iron can stay unplugged. The next step is installing the two decoders and the lights. After that I will paint a decal the loco. But that is most likely after August. I will photo every step of those two procedures as I have the build. If I were to figure the hours spent on actual work this loco would have taken 8 hours a day 5 days a week for 2 months or more to get it to this point. I have uploaded some videos of the first ever run to YouTube.com. To see them just go to youtube.com and type in mopac 1414. What you will see is a first every back and forth run and then a run around the layout on individual video section. Mike Swederska
