Class 37

The original Farish chassis is pretty basic by the comparison with American and some European models, the new chassis is much better but I wanted to see what could be done for the old Farish model. One option which I looked at was to add flywheels, but this seemed like a lot of work and would still retain the DCC unfriendly "live" chassis arrangement. Some research on the relevant Yahoo groups and the Littlewood website suggested that a Lifelike loco would provide suitable parts for a conversion.
I purchased a Lifelike Alco PA on ebay. The loco has a 5 pole skew wound motor with dual flywheels, and all wheel pickup. The bogie wheelbase is a direct match for the Graham Farish Class 37 and Class 47 bogie frames, unlike the E7 chassis used on Littlewood. At £10-£15 the Lifelike chassis is a great upgrade for the Farish models, it's not as smooth or as slow as my Atlas and Kato locos, but consider the price! I represents an easy conversion to DCC, although I have yet to carry this out.

Description


The first task is to remove the large weights from both ends of the PA chassis. At the same time I removed the small lamp and it's associated wiring. The weights are clipped onto the top of the bogie gear towers using C shaped plastic mouldings, these are relatively easy to release. I also disconnected the wires running to the motor brushes.
Because the Farish designed 37 was intended to fit a Class 47 chassis it's necessary to copy the chassis measurements from that rather than use prototype measurements. As a result I had to add an extra 4mm to the centre of the base, at the same time cutting the copper pickup strip - this can be bridged later with a short jumper lead.

The bogie frames should be removed and replaced with the now redundant Farish ones, this involved a little filing. The bogie frames easily unclip, if fact if you pull on them from below they'll come straight off! The completed chassis looked ok, but sat too high on the bogies, probably no higher than the original chassis, but the only original Graham Farish chassis I have is in store at the moment. I remedied this problem by filing away the bottom 1.5-2mm of the moulding that intrudes into the body shell behind the cab doors. As a final act of ridiculousness I fitted Microtrains 1129 couplers in place of the rapidos.