Finally finished a OO F3!

A work in progress pic showing the lighting balance.

Looks great!

Thanks! Here’s a midnight meeting on the kitchen counter. My engineers were arguing with their manager over how to handle the pilot and truck sideframes.

That is a really nice looking F3, @christie. 

Thank you. It’s my second real attempt at doing this, third overall.
There’s one mistake and one issue I might revisit but not now. The mistake is that I cut the outline in the hallmark chassis backwards with respect to the Walther’s donor drive chassis. That’s why the fuel tank is actually reversed! That’s the mistake - and irrecoverable without wasting another hallmark model.

The issue I might revisit just bugs me from some angles- the truck sideframes are from the drive donor, sometimes look a little too small, which of course they are. If it really bugs me after a while I might swap them out for a pair of mantua/tyco HO sideframes which I have that are bigger. But for now, I’m happy with the results and that I can call something “done”.

A very interesting project in an even more interesting scale.  Thanks for sharing!  I have several of the N scale Hallmark GG1s that are postwar short scale and one Lionel produced in N scale that is scale length with a fixed frame.  You have inspired me to ponder how I might make one of the postwar style ones operational just to have something unique and different!

Thanks Jonathan. Credit goes to https://americanootoday.com for the idea of converting a Hallmark Century 2333, and it’s a project pretty much everyone dabbling in OO goes for. I got very lucky in my discovery that the cheap Walther’s GP is a really smooth runner and that the math worked out that a 1/87 GP wheelbase is within spitting distance of a 1/76 F unit.

There is a Century 2332 GG1 from that Hallmark series that sort of scales out to 1/76. The F3 turns out to be nearly exactly 1/76 of the prototype.  The GG1 however, is definitely a scaled down version of the Lionel original. So it has the same relationship to the prototype as a Lionel 2332 does, but in OO rather than O gauge, if that makes sense. I’d really love to get one of those running, but needs solving a lot of tricky problems with regard to the drive and pilot trucks. Maybe next year???