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The Builders Depot

Customizing & Kitbashing

Wood Ore Car

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scsshaggy
Big Boy

Status: offline

Posted - March 05 2021 : 5:08:45 PM

I suppose it's more like a scratch build than a kitbash, but I suppose it could be a kitbash of MDC trucks, Kadee couplers, Midwest balsa wood, and ore from an abandoned mine the name of which I don't know.

A few vacations ago, I was playing around in an abandoned mine that had once produced fluorspar, the non-gem form of fluorite (calcium fluoride). It's used as a flux to draw silicon out of molten iron. Many kinds of ore just look like uninteresting rocks. I once saw some gold ore that looked like broken cement, but fluorspar is a bit more conspicuous, being purple. I brought a little home, and thought it would be fun to build an ore car to showcase it.

If you mount MDC trucks on a bolster 1/8" below the underside of the car, and Kadee couplers in their own boxes on the underside of the floor, the coupler height comes out pretty close to right. If you get the screw hole nice and straight and square, the car tracks pretty well. Holding that right angled piece of metal against the drill bit guides it in plumb and true.

Here the trucks are mounted on the car floor.

With side sills and end sills in place, it's possible to properly place and attach the couplers.

The next step is to add the side walls. They're made of stakes and planks cut from 1/32" balsa wood with a sharp hobby knife.

End walls are also built up with planks and weights are added. The disadvantage to all-wood construction is that a car could end up weighing almost as much as a handful of popcorn unless weight is added. The weights nearest the ends are cut from tire balancing weights that ended up disappointingly being not made of lead when I tried to melt it. Weights are glued in place with Shoe Goo. It works very well, but be patient. It takes a while to dry.

The wire parts (stirrup steps, hand rails, hand brake wheel and hopper latches) are added and primed.

This end shot shows the brake wheel and staff, end ladders built into the wood, hopper car slope sheets and a false floor for the load. The car won't be run empty, so there was no need to model the bottom part of the hopper.

Here's the finished product. The inside was weathered to look like dirty old wood, and then sealed with acrylic matte medium to keep diluted glue from dissolving the white glue holding the car together. Bolt heads on the outside are just dots of glue. The outside was painted gray and then hand lettered with a regular ballpoint pen. I was going to use an ultrafine felt tip pen, but an experiment on a painted scrap of wood showed that marker ink wicks out into a big black dot. Finally, the Fluorspar was crushed to HO scale and glued in with diluted carpenter's glue.

Carpe Manana!

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RP model railroads
Big Boy

Status: offline

Posted - March 05 2021 : 9:05:49 PM

Amazing work, shaggy!!

"Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in Heaven." - Matthew 5:16

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