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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

It is a strange fact that I have never scratchbuilt a flat car before.  I clearly remember the Kalmbach book, Easy to Build Model Railroad Freight Cars, recommending that you should start out with a flat and work your way up to house cars; of course, I also clearly remember ignoring that advice and leaping […]

Ellen Hood played flute in high school band across from me and my clarinet.  Apparently, I was poorer than most kids at hiding my hobby as she found out about it, and introduced me to her dad, Tom.  For several years afterward, I joined Tom’s work sessions on Tuesday evenings, I guess until I moved […]