So with the Gondola conquered to my liking I decided to turn my attention to a must have for any US railroad model. The Boxcar. My subject was a 40' model the drawing was found in a google book online. All the dimensions were there so it was an easy, if not somewhat tedious job to convert them to T scale and make a drawing using open office to help to see how to put everything together. The actual construction of the car isn't too difficult just have to be careful. The smallest piece of styrene cut for the mode was the ends which are about 6.5mm x 7.5mm so not tiny. If you've built in N scale you've likely handled smaller pieces of styrene. Here's the picture of the progress complete with some failures in the background. The car is 1 inch (25 mm) long
So there we go. The sides are made from 2.5mm v groove embossed styrene and the ends are .75mm metal siding embossed styrene, with some of the ribbing shaved away up in the eaves area. The ladder is from a ship models etching.It looks OK. I'm very pleased with the effect created by the metal siding styrene for the ends. I couldn't hope for much better.
The thing that bugs me on this test model is the roof angle. Its too steep. It's difficult to cut a shallow angle when you're slicing through the ribbing of the embossing.
So its another good start. Boxcars can definitely be built in 1:450 scale. Just need to sort that roof out.
2 comments:
Suggestions for making correctly-sloped roofs: start with the ends cut square, as tall as the peak. Then, mark the smooth side with lines for the proper slope, and gently sand the parts down to the lines. For the roof, you only need one part the size of the whole roof; simply score it down the middle with a knife, and carefully bend the sheet along the score just a little. That should do the trick.
Thanks David:
But I was ahead of you on that one. Mind you it took me a couple more attempts to work that method out...
Ian
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