Not that much room under flat cars

The Vancouver Train Expo seems a long time ago now. The bolster pattern that I worked on there? Yeah, it didn’t work out. I had forgotten to leave room for the straps and bolts on the tops of the trucks. Well, one nice thing about modelling in styrene is that mistakes are quick and cheap […]

Driver drawing

As I’m planning to print patterns for the wheels, I could no longer be satisfied with blank discs representing the wheels, even in OnShape. They’re a bit of a challenging part to draw, but I think I’ve captured the look of this photo from the Parry Sound Public Library. Possibly the hub is too small – […]

Flat car ends finished

Please excuse the dreadful iPhone photo. It’s been one of those nights. One of those nights when I should have just stayed upstairs. As expected, I wound up shaving off the outer-most nut bolt washer (NBW) castings so I could centre them relative to the side sills. This also made it easier to add the […]

Towards loco wheels

As the workshop project rounds up, I will soon have no reason to hold off on starting work on 622. The first major stumbling block is of course wheels. If I can’t make those, then I may as well abandon the project; and by that, I don’t just mean the engine, I mean Pembroke itself. […]

No-measure flat car ends and stringers

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 […]

Integral weights for flat cars

Okay, so the approach of welding the sides to the ends didn’t work so well. The weights themselves pose a much larger gluing surface, however, and so, I made them integral to the cars. To do this, I first coloured up some paper to look like the bottoms of the deck boards, and spray-glued it […]

Flat cars teach a Lean lesson

The Toyota Production System — Lean Manufacturing here in North America — will tell you that batch-building is bonkers. Lean suggests that we should limit work in progress, and build things one at a time. By building in batches, we build batches of blunders. Maybe they’re right. As I started assembling the flat car sides […]

Flat car sides and ends

The evening of detailing did nothing to shake my conviction that three models is enough. Once I’d trapped the little wandering buggers with some tape, the stake pocket jig and its low-tech companion, the end sill template, worked beautifully. Okay, the “end sill template” is just a piece of paper with ticks on it; to use […]

Flat car build plan

I can see that I’m going to finish these flat cars with a little kit of jigs and templates. Hopefully when I go to dust them off one day, I will remember this series of posts. Here, for example, is the plan that shows how pieces of the frame are supposed to fit together. If […]

Canonical flat car and load

In order to get swappable loads, I need to not only get the stake pockets all aligned, but also the side sills the same distance apart and aligned relative to one another. I should count my blessings that these cars do not appear to have end pockets! I had thought that simply building all […]