Bill, thanks for your progress report. Your words induced me to get out my
SC&F 2-dome kit. Like many of my kits it's almost done, the next step being
the railings.
I made the railing in two pieces, 2 'C' shaped pieces meeting under the
ladder on one side and at the same place on the other side. I then joined
them with bits of hypodermic tubing. Since the joints in the center of each
side would be visible, I cut them to hopefully look like they belonged,
cutting them the match the space between the two center bands of rivets. I
forgot to add an end stanchion to the wire for one end and had to unbend
that 'C', add the stanchion, and re-bend the wire. The two 'C's almost meet
at the center and with the long bit of tubing, there was room to center the
tubing before gluing.
Now, with some trepidation, on to the steps.
Since the question comes up every time the words hypodermic tubing are
mentioned, I got mine from Walthers, Ngineering N2032-4, .032 OD, .0195 ID
Stainless Tubing.
Jim Hayes
On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 8:54 AM, Bill Welch <fgexbill@...>wrote:
**
I spent my hobby time this morning drilling and tapping the five tank
car center sills and just finished installing the couplers. It is
very clever the way Jon designed the couple box to stay in scale with
some of the coupler base exposed yet fit within the constraints of
the box. I used long nylon #72 screws that will be eventually
trimmed. My tap resulted in the screws being a little loose, so I did
not run the tap all the way through, meaning the last few turns of
the screws have more bite. The covers have a flange intended to match
that on the center sill but they are so thin the do not line up.
Tomorrow I will shim them all to get better alignment. There is very
little room for the coupler to move laterally and I cannot tell if
the centering spring really has any effect at all. In a very tight
curve things could go awry. Those of us that have built the little
PSC Van Dyke tank car as standard gauge following Richard H's RMC
article in the 1990's will remember that coupler arrangement has very
little lateral movement also.
All in all things went well
Bill Welch
2225 Nursery Road; #20-104
Clearwater, FL 33764-7622
727-470-9930
flexible@...
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