I recently acquired a set of powered trucks suitable for modern EMD diesel locomotives from the Chinese vendor Evemodel. Well, it turned out I purchased the exact same trucks quite a while ago, when this site was still mainly written in German and made a comparison with a brand manufacturer product.
The article is here: Evemodel 3 Axle Powered Truck.
It was with this discovery, that I had the realisation, I’d never built anything with it. So that’s about to change. The target loco is an EMD SD70, SD70M, SD70-M2 or SD70ACE, as all use very similar trucks more or less based on EMD HTCR radial steering trucks. But HTCR II, HTSC and HTCR-4 variants are not far off and might be realized using sourced detail parts or 3D printed detail parts. There is an SD70M-2 reference on trains.com (external link), super-detailing parts info and reference on detailswest.com and an SD70M-2 video-review on YouTube (external link).
I started with the chassis by building the truck mounting bolsters in Blender first, then I created a frame with suitable fuel tank using Blender again. The following photos show the most recent iteration.
As visible only the trucks and motor are left as is. The lower frame and upper decking are separate parts. The drive shafts have also been 3D printed, but I will replace these with some factory parts, if I can source them, for a reasonable price.
Workshop – SD70M-2 using Evemodel trucks and a custom chassis
I happily modeled away with the results from above and was soon on my way to create a 3D printable SD70 Locomotive. Frankly, it is very unclear at this moment, whether that is a feasible and completable project. I’m just having fun. More on this in it own follow-up article: Workshop – SD70M-2 using Evemodel trucks and a custom chassis