Heljan O Gauge Class 33 DCC fitting and reassembly - part II - all finished and ready to roll!!

Over the last couple of days I have managed to finish putting my Heljan Class 33 back together. This has been one of those projects where nothing has gone right and the modelling has been a bit slow and disjointed. I originally reassembled the locomotive and installed the DCC sound chip, only to discover that one of the motors was not running correctly, which created stuttering, especially at low speeds. I took the locomotive apart again and stripped the bogie down; I suspected a cracked gear but could not find one. When the locomotive was running the motor seemed to working upwards a little in the motor casing - this was despite making sure every screw was tightened up. Ultimately, I could not find the reason for the poor running....

Finally, the class 33 ready for service!

So in the end, I decided to remove all of the gears from one of the bogies and disconnect the motor, snipping the wires and sealing the ends in insultation tape. I left the motor in-situ to provide some weight and balance to the locomotive. The upshot is, the loco runs perfectly well on one motor, however I am bit miffed that one motor has effectively been consigned to the rubbish bin, when the locomotive has barely been run.

Despite the trials with this project, I am pretty happy with the end result. At normal exhibition viewing distances the class 33 looks pretty good!

After some testing I was pleased that the locomotive was running correctly and reinstalled the Heljan hand rails.  I have no idea why Heljan opted for plastic handrails - they are somewhat fragile, surely metal would have been better? However, they have now been reattached and look OK, although one of the hand rails is sticking out a little too far and I will reset it this morning. 

I was particularly pleased with the detailing on the underframes and bogies, the colour contrasts have worked well.

So finally, the class 33 project is now finished! Lots of errors along the way and also a brilliant learning curve for working and detailing O gauge models. When it was all put back together and was running on the DCC test track, I did think, yes that looks pretty good. In a few years time I might well revisit this locomotive but for now it can happily plod up and down the layout. With a lot of lessons learnt, I am about to start the weathering and detailing of a class 122 bubble car and class 42 warship, although I hope to complete these projects a little more quickly than the class 33! It is great to now have another completed locomotive to run on my layout and I am getting close to having enough rolling stock to run at an exhibition; I just need to get the layout finished.......more on that soon.....

The class 33 idling on the DCC test track, pulling a couple of pieces of rolling stock from the engineers department.