Hawk & Badger Railroad Forum

What I've discovered since writing this post is that the defining points for connecting rod attachment to the drivewheel, and coupling bar attachment to the drivewheel, and the offset of the rotation centre for all wheels (drivewheel, coupled, bogies whatever) should all have the same X axis value. This sorts the drivetrain geometry perfectly. To get the connecting rod and coupling bar visually outside the wheels, the points for their graphics are offset relative to the attachment points.

If the attachment point of the coupling bar is set further out than the rotation centre of the drivewheel this will throw things out of whack. No matter how much you try to offset the coupling bar it will still look like it's stuffed through the drivewheels from some angles, even though the points that define its graphics are well outside the wheels. As soon as you put the attachment point at the same X axis value as the rotation centre of the drivewheel, suddenly the coupling bar graphics pop outside the wheels to the spot where you want them.

Gumboots wrote:If you can be bothered waiting that long, I was going to do a total rebuild of the 1.06 Black 5 anyway. Depends how fast you want it.

If you are planning on tweaking the loco model itself at all, I can tell you that the Atlantic is much, much easier to work with than the Pacific. If you're not going to change the loco nmodel, it probably doesn't matter much. The existing pig-dog mutant "Black 5" is based on the Atlantic.