Aristo Doodlebug

General:

The doodlebug is made from an Aristo heavyweight combine. There is a power truck added to the front, and a standard HW roof is cut short on one end.

If yours has traction tires, it would be good to replace those wheels with "solid" ones, the loco will track better, and have better pickup. You may have a little loss of tractive effort, but add a little weight. See the main aristo page for the part numbers for the "solid" wheels.

Disassembly:

The rear of the car has an MU cable, but luckily it is easily removed since it connects to the 2 screw terminals shown below (I've already removed it):

To remove this truck, you need to remove the screws and feed the wires out through the hole, when you do it will come off after removing the 2 truck screws as shown below:

You cannot see it well in this lousy picture, but one of the posts is already split! Brand new. Common problem in Aristo.

To remove the roof, you need to unscrew the end. Open the door, and get a long shanked philips screwdriver. The screw goes in the white circle you can see above the screwdriver tip. (Again a lousy picture, did at night on the kitchen counter!):

Now the top will pop off, there are 2 tabs on each side that hook in. The sliding doors will fall away, the roof functions as the top "track" for them. To put back together, leave the doors open and wrap a piece of tape through the open doorway to keep them in place.

Smoke?

R.J. DeBerg added smoke to his doodlebug.

Here's a few pictures: