I have been working on this one for a while now. I know that there was a plan to make this train, but in the end the idea was scrapped, and I think they went with a tired face Percy RC instead. I believe someone tried to make this particular custom, but I don’t believe it was functional with “flippers” that could take advantage of the flip face track, which mine is. I had a real hard time trying to get the faces to function like the Thomas one. I ultimately went with 2 Diecast wooden railway motorized faces. One I drilled a whole in the mouth area to recreate a surprise face, and changed up the eyebrows a bit. To recreate the 2 sided spinning face I sanded down a donor flip face Thomas down to the pin area. I then filled the gaps with putty. I then just glued the Percy faces to it, and sanded it to the right dimensions to fit into the shroud and spin. This was then mated to the original Thomas mechanism. To get the Percy body on the Thomas body, and more importantly to get the flip face part to function I had to do a few difficult areas of modification. In order to make the face flip part I had to reuse the original Thomas flip face shroud. To get everything to fit and sit properly I had to cut Percy’s body shorter. The front of the body and the 2 front facing extensions had to be cut shorter, and then capped off with pieces of green plastic from other Percy bodies. Finally I had to put in a regular Trackmaster motor and sand down the inside of the shell for it to fit. All parts were then glued down to the frame. To further try and distinguish my custom from the Thomas version I used an RC Stanley troublesome truck battery tender to run my Percy. To change the current strength I only used one of the battery slots, and wired it appropriately to reduce the amount of heat since originally the 3 AAA batteries are partly used to run the infrared RC portion of the train. Now the wiring goes directly to the motor terminals like in most other Trackmaster trains. I hope you enjoy video. If you haven’t already subscribed please do, and also like the video if you appreciate the work.
This train will be up for sale on eBay with the flip face track after the video premieres.
0 Comments