Date
1 - 20 of 22
Hacking (not the electronic kind)
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mopacfirst
Has anyone ever tried to cut the sides from an IM or Kadee (model of PS-1) box with welded sides, and splice then into a Branchline body, in order to get a welded-side boxcar such as the mid-to-later fifties production? Or is this just too lunatic an idea to pursue?
Of course, what I'd like more than anything else is a body molding for Atlas / Branchline that already has welded sides, ten-panel or twelve-panel, but I don't see that happening any time soon. More germane to what I want to do, is the body material of a Kadee car capable of gluing / solvent-welding to other plastic components? I've installed Kadee doors into more than a few IM and Branchline cars and they've seemed to hold up. Ron Merrick |
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Benjamin Hom
Ron Merrick asked: "Has anyone ever tried to cut the sides from an IM or Kadee (model of PS-1) box with welded sides, and splice then into a Branchline body, in order to get a welded-side boxcar such as the mid-to-later fifties production? Or is this just too lunatic an idea to pursue?" Why bother? It's easier to remove the rivet detail and scribe in new weld lines for 10-panel cars, or find an C&BT Car Chops 12-panel welded side car with separate details for those prototypes. Speaking of which, what specific prototypes are you looking to model? Ben Hom |
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mwbauers
There are also very detailed raised urethane decals of a number of different types of welds available in the hobby market.
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The name escapes me, but its that decal place that pioneered the scale rivet decal [not MicroMark] With that you can not only sand off the rivets, and scribe the seams; you can also add the detailed welding. Best to ya, Mike Bauers Milwaukee, Wi
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mwbauers
oh….
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It’s Archer [something] Best to ya, Mike Bauers Milwaukee, Wi
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mopacfirst
Ben:
There are quite a few 40' welded-side cars built through the fifties, some of which jumped out at me when I was checking RPCyc 29 for details of the lettering on a Katy dart-not end car which actually had riveted sides. The direct answer to your question is that I'm frankly not sure I can successfully remove rivet detail enough so as to have no trace of it remaining, so I've been reluctant to apply this relatively obvious method. This is probably a question which will raise more questions than answers, but one never knows. Some techniques lend themselves just fine to a one-off, and there are some techniques that, if they are complicated enough, render themselves not really suitable if I want to build several or a dozen cars of that particular type. So this is kind of my point, that if I live long enough I'd like to build quite a few of these, perhaps even including an X43A someday. Ron Merrick |
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Benjamin Hom
Ron Merrick wrote: "The direct answer to your question is that I'm frankly not sure I can successfully remove rivet detail enough so as to have no trace of it remaining, so I've been reluctant to apply this relatively obvious method. This is probably a question which will raise more questions than answers, but one never knows." You'll never know until you try. Surely you have some Athearn or other junk boxcar shells lying around? You may as well experiment on them. "Some techniques lend themselves just fine to a one-off, and there are some techniques that, if they are complicated enough, render themselves not really suitable if I want to build several or a dozen cars of that particular type. So this is kind of my point, that if I live long enough I'd like to build quite a few of these, perhaps even including an X43A someday." Greg Martin will back me on this - sanding off detail and scribing lines is not difficult. Aircraft modelers do it often to get rid of excess/incorrect rivet detail and correct panel lines, and they deal with curved surfaces. Think about it - what is more difficult, removing and rescribing detail, or cutting apart shells and ensuring that your pieces are proper lengths and square. It's certainly a legit technique, but why make things harder for yourself? Ben Hom |
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mopacfirst
True, I would do the Archer weld lines rather than scribing, which I did thirty years ago and didn't like the appearance of. I used to have to do things like carve off the second (water) hatch off the sides of Athearn F7 models, and carve and fill and sand to get a blank dynamic brake hatch, or cut up the Athearn "62 foot" tank car in order to get what we would now call a beer-can tank car, in the days before there was more than one producer of plastic F unit models and more than two different injection-molded tank cars. That's really why I would rather come up with other ways to do this.
But this was really a what-if question, just to see if anyone had actually experimented with this. One thing about STMFC-ers is that some of them are not above just about anything in the quest for a better model. Ron Merrick |
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mwbauers
There is one more way to do the simulated welding.
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I’ve done road and roof tar lines this way after reading about others doing it. So I certainly didn’t invent it. For those you use a black or near-black paint to simulate the tar-lines, I’d use a more neutral grey for a weld line that gets painted over. You fill a medical or glue syringe with artists tube paint and shoot the line with it. For roads and roofs, you’d use a fine tip nylon glue syringe that might be too wide a line for car weld lines. In the hobby world of tools you could use something that mounts the very small blunt steel needles sold for very fine gluing. We do have some fine steel tipped glue syringes that would be perfect for this method. I do have a bunch of insulin syringes that have a much smaller needle end than the nylon glue syringes have. If you have access to those, you could use them for fine, thin continuous weld lines. The Archer weld seams replicate still more types of weld seams, and are quite worthy model details to apply for variety of detail. Best to ya, Mike Bauers Milwaukee, Wi
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Greg Martin
In response to Ron Merrick's email Ben Hom writes in
part:
Ben Hom<
Ron,
Ben's right, removing the rivets from an
existing freight car is far easier and more productive cutting a kit apart to
rebuild into something is was never intended to be. I would venture to guess
that if you took that approach the level of frustration would give the project
the "glide test"in a hurry.
Ron, we recreated the PRR X45 50-foot
single door boxcar car as a SHAKE_N_TAKE project in 2008 for our Cocoa Beach
project. We used the Branchline Boxcar; however you could use the ACCURAIL car
as well (as practice if you wish to first hone your skills). After dong three
so far I could do them in my sleep.
If you wish fine and old Front Range Kit
which should be had for a minor sum and practice, if you
need help in a generic way, tell us your prototype and we can help,
but for heaven sakes don't wish too long for someone to release it or
bother slicing and dicing better kits for such an easy project.
Greg Martin
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Tom Madden
You don't want to use Archer's weld lines, you want their panel seams. Tom Madden |
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mwbauers
Can you please expand on that comment?
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Aren’t the seams welded ??? Best to ya, Mike Bauers Milwaukee, Wi On Aug 8, 2015, at 11:37 PM, pullmanboss wrote: |
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mopacfirst
That's a useful suggestion. I hadn't seen those before, perhaps because of where they are listed.
I parted with my last Front Range cars a few weeks ago, courtesy of someone on this list who has a use for them. But believe me, I have plenty of scrap undec freight car bodies to practice on. Thanks for all the comments, guys. I believe I've received a consensus, so now I'm going back to the workbench. Ron Merrick |
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mopacfirst
I can see the reason behind this.
In HO, these seams are just too small to distinguish the individual ripples of typical arc welding. I know, somebody (Athearn?) actually tried to simulate the weld bead surface, but on the other hand, so many rivet lines modeled in HO are twice or more the size they should be. Branchline's are examples of ones that are about the right size to my eye. Although I recall being up close and personal with a lot of freight cars with welded seams, I can't remember exactly how the surface of the weld bead looked. But I think most car side fillet welds by the fifties and after would have showed signs of being subarc (SAW) welded, which gives an even smoother weld bead surface than exposed welding like MIG (GMAW). In either case, you can see the ripples and the curvature of the rippled surface indicates which direction the welding was done, but on an SAW surface they are barely perceptable. (That direction is the way that the concave side of the ripples all point.) Of course, I didn't know about such things at the time. And this is no doubt somewhat subjective. Not so repair welding on cars, say welding patches onto car sides, which was much rougher and probably oxyacetylene welded most of the time, in small repair shops. A few photos of production welding on freight car manufacturing, which are readily available, might provide more clarity. And I've ordered some of the various weld lines from Archer, but for HO car welding on light gage metal I'm at the bottom end of the range of weld sizes they produce. Bear in mind that the width of the cover pass is generally only 1/4" to 3/8", since on a car side I believe most production welds were two fillet welds back-to-back in a single pass, welding two 0.010" side sheets onto the flat surface of a rolled structural shape. I'll go look at some published documentation to see if the details can be inferred, but I don't think I've ever seen a welding drawing from car side fabrication. Ron Merrick |
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Andy Carlson
The Athearn ACF CenterFlow (much beyond our era) has nicely done TIG welds, if they were on a No 1 gauge car; otherwise way oversized for HO. I do admire the tooling. Ron's mention of the Branchline rivets looking scale size brings up an observation of mine; many of us have harvested rivets from donor cars to be applied one-by-one to the recipient car. Often the donor body would be an Athearn house car, and the rivet transplanting would be doable primarily because of their oversizeness facilitates handling and glueing. I challenge anyone to harvest the Branchline rivets (from an undecorated shell). These BL rivets are smaller than black pepper grains and it would be hard to even determine the flat base for mounting. The ongoing movement of finer modeling, which thankfully has been picked up by the hobby manufacturers, gives us the luxury of abandoning formerly embraced and acceptable models with out-of-proportion detail such as oversized rivets. Ron Merrick wrote:
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Tony Thompson
Tom Madden wrote:
Mike Bauers responded:
I agree with Tom. The Archer weld lines are okay for repair welding but in HO scale (and yes, they do have a set labeled HO scale) they are pretty heavy for production welding. I did use the Archer weld lines on a storage tank which was going to be back from the aisle on my layout, but would not do so for a freight car of structure near the layout edge. Tony Thompson Editor, Signature Press, Berkeley, CA 2906 Forest Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705 www.signaturepress.com (510) 540-6538; fax, (510) 540-1937; e-mail, tony@... Publishers of books on railroad history |
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Greg Martin
Ron and all,
As Ben knows I don't use and don't promote the use of seams or weld beads
when I model welded cars as I believe that the seams become too exaggerated. I
use a technique where you first determine the panel line and mark it with a
graphite pencil line and then mark a second line immediately next to it
with a complimentary color (orange for Freight car color) and let the
minds eye take care of the rest. It works...
Greg Martin
Eventually all things merge into one and a river runs through
it. Norman Maclean Ron Merrick writes:
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North Model Railroad Supplies <nmrs@...>
You don't want to use Archer's weld lines, you want their panel seams. Hi Tom, What is/are the parts number/s for Archer panel seams please? I can’t find them in their catalog. Cheers Dave North
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Dave, Google is your friend. http://www.archertransfers.com/AR88013.html > You don't want to use Archer's weld lines, you want their panel seams. > Tom Madden Hi Tom, What is/are the parts number/s for Archer panel seams please? I can�t find them in their catalog. Cheers Dave North |
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mwbauers
I just don’t recognize those panel lines as being weld-line-realistic. The lines are too perfect edged for a weld face.
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Are the cars welded on the backside of the body panels ????? That would make the perfect edged seam lines the right ones to use. Best to ya, Mike Bauers Milwaukee, Wi On Aug 9, 2015, at 3:14 PM, Tim O'Connor wrote: |
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Tom Madden
> What is/are the parts number/s for Archer panel seams please? > I can’t find them in their catalog. > Cheers > Dave North They are under the Aircraft category as "Raised Panel Lines, Various Scales". Part #AR88013. I use them on my master patterns to define the edges of panels that are coplanar. This photo shows how I used them to define the edges between the clerestories and the AC ducts on some heavyweight Pullman roof patterns. The : http://www.pullmanproject.com/3979-3.JPG Archer's primary market is military modelers, and their weld beads look (to my eye) just too rough and rugged for HO freight cars. Like they'd be OK for joining heavy steel armor plates, but not thin car side sheets. Tom Madden |
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