Measure once cut twice. These are words to live by.
Reasoning that there are only two truss rods on these 20-ton, 33-foot cars, and given the number of bolt heads on the ends, I felt six stringers were in order. That makes 18 in total, which would be a disagreeable amount of fiddling to get them all to be straight.
So, I spent some time making a gauge that fits between the side sills, and positions the stringers for gluing. When I’ve done this with styrene, I positioned all stringers first, and then fed solvent in from the side. For the wood to paper bond here, it turned out to be easier to position and glue the stringers one at a time.
A cannier modeller would have left one end off and trimmed the stringers to length in place. Sadly, at the time, I was not so cunning, and wound up performing a disagreeable amount of cutting to fit. I’ll aim to improve next time.
Pembroke:87 