From: main@RealSTMFC.groups.io <main@RealSTMFC.groups.io> On Behalf Of Tom Madden via Groups.Io
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2018 12:19 AM
To: main@RealSTMFC.groups.io
Subject: [RealSTMFC] Resin casting - the view from here

I’m feeling particularly reflective and aware of my own mortality after Sunday’s bittersweet celebration of life for my late wife, and want to set down my thoughts on the history of resin casting in the hobby from my viewpoint as a long-time resin caster. I apologize for the length and beg your indulgence, and hope this will add to the record rather than confuse it.

Tom Madden

In my Bell Labs career (1960-1994) I was fortunate enough to be awarded a number of patents. Each was the result of my perceiving a need, solving a problem, or seizing an opportunity. I'm proud of those patents, but the reality is, the needs, problems and opportunities were there for anybody, and if it hadn't been me, it would have been someone else. Most likely sooner rather than later. It's important to separate the true innovators from those whose contributions are founded on the work of others, or who just happen to come along at the right time. ("When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.")

Bill Clouser was certainly an innovator, but for me it's because of his articles on using Strathmore papers for modeling. (The Strathmore Story, MR, February & March 1959. Later that same year another innovator, Al Armitage, had his landmark articles on styrene modeling appear in MR.) By the mid-'60s a number of us were, as Dennis mentioned, using tooling resin (epoxy) to cast parts in silicone rubber molds for personal use. Bill's casting was the ultimate expression of that technology, and his work was superb. Problem was, epoxy is a very aggressive casting medium and you'd be lucky to get 6 or 8 good parts from a mold. I was making some very nice HOn3 parts using Ren and Ciba-Geigy epoxies, but cost wise I couldn't compete with brass parts, let alone with Grandt Line plastic parts when they came along. All credit to Bill Clouser for seeing the bigger picture and being the first to offer commercial cast resin parts, but he wasn't the only one using the technology at the time.

The true innovator for resin casting in the hobby was, at least for me, Jack Work, with his March 1961 MR article on cold detail casting in rubber molds. He used Devcon Liquid Steel, a thick, solvent-based putty-like material available in both tubes and cans. You'd squeegee it into an open faced mold, smooth the back, let the solvent evaporate, and 10 or 15 minutes later (for small parts) pop the now-hardened part out of the mold. About the time Jack's article came out a rep for either GE or Dow visited my lab to show some new semiconductor potting compounds. One was a liquid rubber material which didn't need heat to vulcanize, you just mixed two components together and it self-cured. They called it "Ready to Vulcanize" or "RTV" for short. The rep left a pint sample with us, a coworker glued a nickel to a glass plate and with cut-up tongue depressors made a little box around it. We mixed up some of the new material and filled the box with it, came in the next morning and melted some Woods Metal (a low melting point alloy like CerroBend) and poured it into the mold cavity. A half hour later, using a mere $5 worth of Woods Metal, we had a dozen single-sided cast metal nickels to play with. (In retrospect, the economics of that were about the same as for my later cast epoxy parts.)

We eventually threw the cast coins back in the melt pot, but that weekend I went to the hardware store and bought a can of Liquid Steel. The HOn3 market was served with brass parts by Kemtron, Balboa (under the Slim Princess label), and an outfit in Texas called Slim Gems. I was building a bunch of D&RGW HOn3 box cars, passenger cars and cabooses using Clouser's layered Strathmore construction technique and needed lots of detail parts. Availability was the problem, not affordability, so I proceeded to duplicate everything from coupler pockets to truck side frames with Liquid Steel following Jack's article. Even made some two sided "squash molds" for doing side frames so I could incorporate the bearing holes. (Liquid Steel had a component which made it self-lubricating so the bearing holes didn't wear.)

The cold-cast Liquid Steel parts were hard and looked good, but they had hardened by drying, not by curing, and lacked cohesive strength. Great for surface details, not good for structural parts. This didn't become an issue until 1964, when in the course of re-detailing one of my two PFM HOn3 K-27 locos my pliers slipped when I was attempting to remove the number board and I gouged a smiley face into the smoke box front. I was horrified and terrified - we hadn't started a family so Gail was still working, but I thought I had destroyed a model that had cost over 10% of my monthly pre-tax income! It took a week or two before I could consider the problem rationally, but I ended up completely unsoldering all the parts of the other K-27's smoke box front, making an RTV mold of it, and casting duplicates - not from Liquid Steel, but from Ciba's Araldite potting compound. Araldite was a clear epoxy so you could see any entrapped bubbles. Slightly heating the mix reduced the viscosity enough for the bubbles to float out before it "kicked". Much to my relief the replacement smoke box front was a perfect reproduction. So much so that I also duplicated the headlight, headlight bracket, number board and marker lights in Araldite.

So my casting experience started in 1961, and my resin casting in 1964 in a clear case of necessity being the mother of invention. I gave up on epoxy casting before we moved to Colorado in 1970, and never did any casting for the rest of my HOn3 days, which lasted into 1986. It was all personal so I make no claim for being a contributor, let alone an innovator. But it did give me a considerable advantage in experience and insight when urethane resins came along in the 1980's.

I'm not exactly sure of the timing, but it was after I'd abandoned HOn3 modeling, after I'd discovered the articles by Dennis, Richard and Al that continue to inspire so many of us, and clearly after the introduction of Al's and Dennis' kits. At a printed circuit manufacturing trade show in Anaheim I found a company, Conap, offering a new resin that claimed many advantages over epoxy - not as an adhesive, but as a casting and encapsulating material. It was, of course, urethane resin. I gave them my card ("Advanced Printed Circuit Laboratory Supervisor" - a title much more grand than the position, considering I supervised only six people) and asked if they could possibly send me a sample. I must confess to ulterior motives - I had no use for the resin in my lab, but I knew, as Dennis discovered several years prior, that this was the casting material I had been waiting for. A week later a package arrived containing two one-gallon containers - one each of part A and part B to be mixed 1:1 by weight - and a spray can of mold release.

Imagine my delight, after those early epoxy casting days, of being able to get 30 or more parts from a mold. Those two gallons of material lasted several years, during the course of which I began an extensive correspondence with Richard Hendrickson and, instead of building his WestRail PFE R-40-23 kit, made all the mods and converted it into a set of patterns for flat casting. In May 1994, two months after I retired, I drove out to the UPHS convention in Ontario, CA, bringing with me a multi-panel display of the R-40-23 showing all the steps from pattern making to finished model. The last panel read: “Gnash teeth in frustration when InterMountain announces injection molded plastic model of the same prototype”.

A year later I literally fell into the opportunity of a lifetime when a former neighbor, seeing my hobby casting setup, insisted I join his newly-formed rapid prototyping company. I stayed for 21 years. Experience in that field, now known as 3D printing, exposed me to industrial resin casting in all its glory – multi-part molds, vacuum assisted mold filling, pressure curing, heat treatments, rigid and flex resins and all that. I couldn’t wait to bring it to the hobby. With more enthusiasm than it deserved, I brought it to the attention of Al and Martin, then later to Jon Cagle, two potential resin casters for Ted, Gene Fusco and Aaron Gjermundsen. Al, Jon, Gene and Aaron were success stories, the two for Ted not so much. And Martin, while declining to add closed mold casting and one piece bodies to his personal skill set, was successful in conning convincing me to cast some 1500 tank car shell sets for Sunshine.

Am I an innovator? I don’t think so – more of a facilitator. I’m certainly pleased with the contributions I’ve been able to make, but as with the patent example back in the first paragraph, if it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else. I’ve also been in the right place at the right time, a number of times, and am not unaware of the role luck has played in what I’ve been able to do and experience. It’s been a helluva ride.

The Delta Lines!! Hugely influential. My Dad's HO scale dream layout (never built) was
based on the Delta Lines design (O scale). When I bought my first house, I also came up
with a ridiculously ambitious track plan based on the DL. In those days I could "duck
under" without injuring myself. :-) And then along came John Armstrong...

Question: Who first popularized "shelf" style, "walk around" model railroads? A major
RPM milestone, IMO.

Tim O'


Peter Ness wrote

 > I know... that Frank Ellison was writing articles on prototype modeling in the 1930's

--
Tim O'Connor
Sterling, Massachusetts

From: main@RealSTMFC.groups.io [mailto:main@RealSTMFC.groups.io] On Behalf Of Dennis Storzek
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2018 10:15 PM
To: main@RealSTMFC.groups.io
Subject: Re: [RealSTMFC] [ResinFreightCarBuilders] RPM Chicagoland Photos

On Mon, Oct 22, 2018 at 03:38 PM, Peter Ness wrote:

For example, I know (from reading, not memory!) that Frank Ellison was writing articles on prototype modeling in the 1930’s…there were others as well.

Peter, I don't know if Frank Ellison really fits that image, from the articles he authored that I recall reading in back issues, his mantra was realistic OPERATION, where instead of running 'round and 'round in a circle, a train departed from a yard, worked its way across the layout, and finally terminated in a yard, although the track plan I vaguely remember showed that one yard was common to both ends of his layout. "A model railroad is a play", If I remember his statement correctly, " the layout the stage, the trains the players, the schedule the script." As to equipment, he reportedly would remove the pilot and trailing trucks on some locomotives, to cut down on derailments. So much for prototype fidelity.

The author I recall first pointing out that the way to build a convincing model was to find a neat prototype and follow it was one time MR editor Paul Larson, although he was concentrating on structures. The scratchbuilt structures for his Mineral Point & Northern that he wrote up for RMC after he left MR were real gems.

The first in depth article about a prototype freightcar I recall was on the X29 boxcar in the original Prototype Modeler magazine sometime in the mid to late seventies. It was like, wow, why can't we have histories like this for all the cars. Unfortunately, I have forgotten the author's name.

Dennis Storzek

I had a great time. I caught several solid presentations, missed a couple, too. There was a wide assortment of excellent modeling on display. 

 

It was great to spend time with friends and several Pre-Depression Era modelers. 

 

I took a fair number of photos but I need to hit the road for home. I hope to upload them to my pBase account as the week rolls along. 

 

Eric Hansmann

Murfreesboro, TN

On Oct 21, 2018, at 3:05 AM, golden1014 via Groups.Io <golden1014@...> wrote:
 

Hi Gents,

 

Any reports from Chicagoland yet?  I sure would like to be there...

 

John Golden

Albersbach, Germany
 

RPM Blog: https://railroadprototypemodeler.wordpress.com/

I don't remember those articles (I was an avid teenage reader of all things railroads)
but I do remember being very impressed in those days by the models of Paul ...[?? damn
another brain cramp] and his beautifully WEATHERED Southern Pacific steam locomotives in
the pages of Model Railroder - at a time when very few people (other than John Allen)
were weathering any of their models.

RPM isn't just rolling stock!

Tim O'Connor

As a impressionable teenager, I remember just being entranced by the March 1971 Model Railroader cover which featured Bill Clouser's O Scale boxcars on the cover. The detail for freight cars was incredible for the time.

There is an interview of Bill by Bob Hegge in the MR issue where Bill describes the process in how he builds a model to make molds. There is several pictures of his completed model work along with a picture of a number of different boxcar ends waiting to be used. He discusses initially selling these boxcars in the "Ultra-Scale" line in the late 1960s. He discontinued selling them by the time the article was published, but said because terrific response, he was thinking about reissuing them. Perhaps someone knows if he did.

A worthwhile read to see the thoughts of a early modeler casting resin kits.

Bill Hirt

Let me help you remember a little more -

Smoky Mountain (Jim King?)
Blue Ridge Historics
CHOOCH - ULTRA SCALE kits (O scale)
Pittsburgh Scale Models (Byron Rose, also a pattern maker)
Randy Anderson (pattern maker)
Joe Pennington (WONDERFUL resin detail parts for freight cars)
Dan Kirlin (resin detail parts maker, now owned by Yarmouth)
Steam Shack (Central Vermont and Rutland kits)
Norwest Kits - Brian Pate (Canadian kits)
Sparrow Point (John Green)
Pocahontas Models (N&W box cars)
OnTrak Models (highway trailers)
Kaslo Car Shops

Yankee Clipper

and ... oh damn I've forgotten ... a dealer who sold wonderful O scale resin car
models at Naperville for years, as one piece bodies ... Ted Schnepf !! =D>

and passenger car parts makers whose names escape me.

and TOM MADDEN (not mentioned)

Just trying to help! :-)

Tim O'Connor

Attendees know that we mentioned and expanded on every resin car manufacturer that we could think of. There were no huge omissions, and Dennis Storzek was mentioned for his contributions as well. We even had the early sawtooth Soo Line boxcars out on the timeline tables.

I went ahead an posted Steve Hile's presentation online here, which should help frame this conversation in a more inclusive light:
http://www.rpmconference.com/index.php/2018/10/22/friends-of-the-freight-car-panel-discussion/

Mike Skibbe
www.rpmconference.com

--
Tim O'Connor
Sterling, Massachusetts

The presentation that my wife, Kristin Dummler, gave on Poultry Cars at RPM Chicagoland along with her handout is now available for download at:

http://trainmodeler.com/clinic-handouts/

There are only 3 options there, one for my Low Vision clinic handout, and then her handout and complete presentation.  

Thank you,

Jeremy Dummler

Wauconda, IL

I just received a preorder for Intermountain PFE  R-40-23 reefers, and the roofs are much lighter and redder than all of the other Intermountain PFE reefers I have. I attached a photo of an Intermountain PFE R-40-10 with the R-40-23 to illustrate the problem. Is this range of colors acceptable, or did Intermountain and their Chinese factory botch the R-40-23 run? I hate it that we have to buy pigs in pokes.
 
Nelson Moyer

Attachments:

• Intermountain PFE Roof Color Variation.JPG