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 […]

The last hobby shop

I confess: even though it was less than two kilometres away, I rarely stopped in at Mr Hobby. They catered to the radio control and plastic modellers, and rarely had anything for me. Occasionally I dipped into their K&S metal rack; they may have sold me a bottle or two of paint. The owner (I […]

Summons

Thanks to my friend, Mark Dance, we remembered to drag the kids to the Monet exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery this weekend. I hold Monet in the same regard as Mozart: he made some good stuff, but it gets repetitive after a while. Having said that, I’ve always liked his paintings of trains. After […]

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 […]

It’s in the red drawer!

“Which drawer is it in?” She hollered from in front of the basement cabinets. “The one with all the party supplies!” I yelled from my comfortable perch beneath my book. The sounds of drawer slides and the abuse of soft-close pistons floated up from the basement. Oh for Pete’s sake, I thought, as I got […]

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 […]

A second bench for the workshop

I keep having to tell myself that all this work on the workshop is in fact work towards the locomotive. Finally this weekend, I managed to get the second cabinet finished to the point where it can be painted. Like the first, it is almost entirely made from scraps left over from my other projects. […]