Fauvet Girel BB locomotive

These diesel-electric shunters were used by many companies and private railways in France, Belgium and Luxemburg. A few years ago I made two locomotives of this type using CNC-milled plastic and etched metal parts. Getting them running was relatively easy as they were designed to use Roco DB V100 (BR 211) motor and bogies. Because of this I figured it would be nice to dig up the old 2D drawings and turn them into a 3D model so you can print your own Fauvet Girel and motorize it with relatively little effort. I also provided parts for a dummy model in case you want to put it in a showcase or it’s just going to sit around a workshop.

When designing my models a few years ago it quickly dawned on me no 2 of these engines are identical. I’m uploading them as a generic “early” and “late” model, but all parts are interchangeable so you can just mix and match if you want to build a specific loco. Some things to look for:

• bogies with visible leaf springs or bolted on plates

• buffer beam area. Some are full height, some are a bit lower. Buffer beam shapes seem all over the place as well… I just picked two versions that seem to be quite common.

• Long hood: apart from endless variations in doors and air gratings (again, I just picked 2 versions that seem to be common) it seems there is basically an early version
  with 6 covers on top and a later version with 3.

• Short hood: smooth or with louvres

• Cab: I spotted a low version (strip below the window in line with the hand rail) and slightly taller version with said strip above the handrail. (not to mention much lower cabs in use in french steelworks, but I ignored that version as it also has a completely different frame)

Assembly:

Bogies: remove the bogies of the roco V100 from the frame, remove the bottom gear cover, take out the axles, swap out the roco bogie detail for the fauvet bogie detail part.
Because the power pickups are attached to the roco bogie detail part you’ll have to make some new power pickups using metal wire, just put them through the little hole in the fauvet bogie part, solder a wire to them and glue them in place. Wheels back in, bolt the gear cover back on and the bogies are done.

Chassis:

Take the motor from the roco V100, remove the plastic inserts in the flywheels for the driveshafts and remove the flywheels from the motor shaft. These are often not very cooperative, so I usually heat them up with a gas torch, pointing the flame away from the motor. As the motor has plastic parts this is always tricky.

After you removed the flywheels put the motor in the chassis, put the bogies in place as well (drop an M2 nut in the hexagonal hole in the chassis and fix the bogie with a 15mm M2 bolt. If you didn’t lose the spring Roco put between the bogie bolt and the bogie, put that in as well) and check how much of the motor shafts and worm shafts of the bogies need to be cut off to make the driveshafts fit again. Measure twice cut once. Now wire up the power pickups to the motor and do a lot of test running to make sure the driveshafts are happy and everything works smoothly.

Dummy chassis:

Put some point bearing axles length 24.5mm in the dummy bogies, add power pickups if you like in case you want to put lights in the loco or something, then bolt the bogies to the chassis. (M2 nut in the hexagonal hole in the chassis, 15mm M2 bolt)

Body:

Not a lot to report here. Pick and choose from the available parts to make a body you like, enjoy the shit sandwich of bending an endless amount of handrails and put it all together. Put the flat interior in the cab if you build a motorized loco, or the full height interior if it’s a dummy.

Electronics:

Well, you’re basically on your own here. Some hints on how I did it:

I made a 4 pin plug on the chassis, with track power and motor wires. This is rather convenient as you can always analog test-run your chassis by connecting the rail to the motor wires. All the digital stuff goes in the body, so you can just glue all the led wiring, decoder, stay alive etc in place in the body and you connect only the 4-pin plug to the chassis.

I put the decoder in the top of the long hood, all the way to the front, the esu powerpack stay alive PCB in the top of the short hood and removed the capacitor from that PCB and put it in the side of the cab. (when wiring the capacitor back up to the PCB note the polarity!)

Then I jammed lead sheet in every possible corner.

Couplers:

I kept things very basic here, just a fixed nem coupler pocket in the buffer beam. Works fine for the kadee 17 couplers I used.

Handrails:

There are soldering jigs included in the print files, bend some 0,4 or 0,5mm brass wire to the correct shape, put it in the jig with some masking tape, solder when happy. In reality the handrails are all in the same plane, but that would make it an absolute pig to solder, so the jigs are set up to solder the second horizontal bar behind the vertical bars. To be honest, I have no idea how well a printed jig will work, but I poked at some resin prints with a soldering iron and they seemed to handle the heat pretty well.

I also included a dxf with the etched parts I used, in case you have access to that sort of technology that’s probably the easier way to do it.

Some pics of my cnc-milled plastic fauvets for inspiration:
https://flickr.com/photos/floris_dilz/albums/72157719526613555

Well, that’s about it. Good luck and have fun!