Marklin's Re 4/4 - Improving the looks - 3 - Pantographs

The very day I received my Re 4/4s, a plan was hatched to replace the big ugly Marklin pantographs with finer, non-functional, etched examples.

Sure, etched ones won't go up and down and they won't collect current, but... I don't need them to. I just need them to look better.

As can be seen here, the real things seem almost invisible:

A tad finer and more petite than the model below. Note that the big current collection shoe is almost the full width on the model compared to the proto:

To be fair, the Marklin panto had to be engineered sturdily-enough to operate up and down consistently over a long period of time in the gritty and dirty hard knocks world of model railways; and be wide enough to collect current over the imperfect, tight, wobbly track and catenary setups that are possible on Z scale layouts. Although I'd wager that only a handful of people actually use the overhead current-collection option on marklin layouts. Indeed reading between the lines on a recent Marklin release makes me wonder if they may drop this option in future.

But be that as it may... the plan was to etch some replacements, and the above was drawn in Sketchup eons ago based on a closeup crop of one of my pics:

And after several years of sitting on this, I finally got a mate who is good at this sort of thing to set it up and get a prototype etched in Phosphor Bronze for me by PPD in Scotland. This material is stronger than brass and should be able to take the inevitable bumps and knocks better.

Well, don't those look fine and dandy?  I don't own any 'Blacken-it' chemical etch or gun blue, so applied a low-tech Sharpie black marker pen to them instead before getting out the pliers.


Folded up:

It took about 5 minutes of prodding with pliers, tweezers and confused looks to do this one, so I will refine my technique as I become more familiar with them, which will result in a 'neater' appearance as I had to bend and rebend a few things.

 The phosphor bronze is certainly much more forgiving than brass, and much stronger indeed. You may notice that I folded the lower support strut the wrong way too...

It certainly looks a bit more scale than the old ones... More fiddling will follow.