I’ve had my 3rd Rail Dec hanging out in the shop for maintenance and some sound enhancements for a few days now. Since it was also due to have its weathering touched up a bit, I thought it might be nice to try some more things with the Creality printer. On a lot of my older 3rd Rails I end up keeping the original 4 wire tether in use for simplicity’s sake. To change this one to something else would entail milling out the frame a bit which is something I’d rather not do. I wanted to add synched chuff to this engine while it was in the shop and this setup had to use an auxiliary plug and tether. To keep it from dragging in the ties, I made a plug hanger last weekend. It got me thinking that so many O scale steam engines don’t have much for deck plates. Some might have a sort of fixed shelf or nothing at all if they don’t sport a hinged plate. I thought that making one for this engine would be fun and it could also help cover my dual tethers by keeping them in shadow. My experiment here is a bolt-on that didn’t require any mods to my engine and also incorporated my Deans plug hanger. Below are some pics of the rapid evolution of my Tinkercad doodles. I went from a couple of fixed versions to the final (?) one now in place. I may CA some diamond plate styrene sheet to the deck at some point. I think once painted and weathered it will look pretty nice. I also played around with making a custom drawbar, a part that may lend itself to some of the metalized PLA now available at some point.
Make a few more, sell them on the forum.
