I know it’s not Wednesday but The biggest thing I have been working on recently is cleaning the workbench again. It’s taken a couple of weeks, but I finally got it clean. I had at least five projects going on at the same time on the workbook all fighting for space and attention.
But with the start of a new year, I thought it would be good to start the year with a clean workbench. There is snow in the forecast for the morning, so I’m hoping I get a chance to start to clutter it up again real soon.
It’s took a while to get some paint of the trucks. Then it took a while longer to get them back in the work line. Some of those freight car projects just go so much faster that it feels like you have actually finished something.
Anyway, these two pair of trucks have had new axels from Protocraft installed. Yes, they are now available from Right-O-Way but I’ve had mine on the shelf since they were a Protocraft product. I also installed ball bearing from Bearing Direct on the axels and also the FineScale 360 Weaver Chain Drive Replacement Kit.
I have to say that these are a pain in the ass to reassemble. Things seem to be moving in so many directions at the same time. It’s difficult to get them all to fit together without something moving. They are taking longer than I thought they would to reassemble.
And for anybody that might be questioning why I have a nice shinny black on the trucks instead of all kinds of weathered blacks/grays/rust. For my modeling period, the Summer of 1952, these units are less than a month old. I don’t think the railroad would have been happy if they had been delivered with well worn trucks.
I am back at work a couple of days a week until the end of the month. This has meant getting out at lunchtime to West Trenton Station. This week I got to see a CSX stack train head North through the station.
Some PRR hopper cars on the workbench getting lettered.
I’ve been working on some PRR GLa’s recently. These four are Precision Scale models imported back the early ’90’s. They are nice cars. I painted them a few years ago, just never got around to decorating the cars.
I’ve run out of the Yoder decals for the GLa’s. They were really nice to work with and I’m glad I saved the leftovers from what I had used in the past. I ended up using a combination of decals on these cars. I tried a Tichy set, and a set from K4 Decals. I can’t say I was excited by either of those sets. But they provided what was missing from my leftover Yoder decals for the GLa’s.
I am also finishing up an Overland PRR H32 Covered Hopper car for a friend. I did use a Tichy set for that car. I had a little trouble using Solvaset on the decals. The decals seemed to lift off the clear carrier film. A little Microscale’s Micro Sol setting solution applied to the letter together with a little pressure was able to get that under control.
An Overland PRR H32 Covered Hopper car making a trip through the Workbench getting some lettering applied for a friend.
Still working on the Weaver gearboxes for my GP7 project. I have to say, putting those little 2-56 nut on the screws that hold them together is a real pain. I know with all the Weaver models that have used them, they had to have come up with a way to easily put them together. Me I’m still trying to find an easy way to hold the nut and start threading it onto the screws. Haven come up with one yet that keeps the nuts from hitting the floor a half dozen times.
It also didn’t help that I was trying to use older gearboxes from an older donor Weaver drive for the second unit. It turned out getting them open was difficult. Someone had placed a drop of ACC on the treads and nut to keep them together.
Progress has been slow, but I still haven’t painted the trucks yet so it’s not really holding me up yet.
Well I got the Locomotive Workshop Baldwin kit home and took a good look at it. It is mostly complete. You can’t see the parts bag behind the body etching. The nose casting are softer then I remember from other kits. They will require some work to fit the four pieces together.
I’ve built other LWS kits in the past, to say they are basic is an understament. I had a friend refer to them once as a scratch building project disguised as a kit.
I’ve wanted to build the CNJ DR 4-4-1500 “Baby Faced Freighters” for a long time. This would give me the two nose castings I would need for the project. I could just use them as is and build the freight units, but I still think I want to build the double ended passenger unit. So I’m planning build one nose up and have resin castings made for the project. At any rate, it’s not at the top of the project list right now. Back into the box to wait a little while before starting that project.
I’ve been working on pair of GP7’s recently. I’ve managed to find a pair of the Atlas O GP7 shells. I am replacing the long hood assembly of a Red Caboose GP9 with the Atlas O GP7 long hood to build my GP7’s.
I am working on the drives first. I’ve been acquiring the parts for this build for a while now. Even before I bought the Atlas O shells.
I started with the P&D replacement drives for the Red Caboose GP9. The two drives have been waiting their turn on the workbench for a while. Funny that when I examined the gear towers of the drives. The top gear of both towers in one drive had cracks. Not a problem as I had planned to replace the gear towers anyway.
I am using the FineScale 360 Gear Tower and also a set of Right-O-Way conversion wheels and truck castings for the P&D EMD Blomberg truck. This conversion set might go back to when these parts were sold be Protocraft.
Since you have to disassemble the truck to install the conversion parts, I thought it would also be a good time to install ball bearing on the axels. You can see one of the ball bearings on the axel below. I’m using a FR133-ZZ Flange Mini Ball Bearing from Bearings Direct.
The model’s bearing in side frame have been modified to fit the new ball bearings on the axel ends. Next step is to paint and reassemble the trucks.
As a Proto48 modeler, I don’t often pay attention to what the 3-rail manufacturers are doing. Last year was no exception, but Lionel did list a new offering for Reading modelers that almost got past me. They released a new model with all new tooling for a Reading passenger car. Actually for two cars, a combine and a coach.
The cars are based on Reading prototypes built by Harlan and Hollingsworth. The cars appear to be a Reading coach class PBn and combine class CVm. Numbers for those cars:
Coach PBn 1100-1175, 1200-1284
Combine CVm 589-592
For 3-rail models, they are surprisingly nice. The body appears to scale out closely to published drawings. The roof contour is very nice, the details on the roof maybe be a little exagerated. The main issues I could find with the cars were:
Underbody details
Steps too steep
Roof vents undersized
Lack of end details to allow for the oversized coupler to have about
Two batten strips on the side of the cars, instead of four on the passenger cars and three on the combine
The car diaphragms are oversized
The two above images show that the steps do not go far enough into the car. Also they show the lack of end details like the uncoupling bars, safety chains, steam and air lines.
There may also be a question of how many roof vents are typically on the combines. Some further sorting through photos and equipment diagrams is needed to answer that question.
I’m pleasantly surprised by this offering from Lionel. The cars are much nicer than I was expecting. They will need some work but are a good starting point to build a nice model.
Lionel is offering three different two car sets. Manufacturers price is $379.99 for each 2 car pack. Prices do vary with different retail outlets. I would suggest shopping around. I picked up my cars at a much better price.
Jon Cagle of Southern Car & Foundry has released a new freight car kit, a 1932 ARA Boxcar. This makes me excited on two levels, first I’m happy to see a freight car kit manufacturer back with a new release in O Scale. And second, this is an important car in freight car development.
If you have built one of SC&F’s kits in the past, you know they are the best kits being made today. The castings are out of this world.
The ladders and yard steps are etched metal.
The instructions are lengthy and well detailed. This should make for interesting reading tonight. I’m really impressed by this kit. Looking forward to building it.
On a different front, Pierre Oiliver of Yarmouth Model Works teased out an image of a PRR X31f O Scale body this past week. I reached out to Pierre and he confirmed that he will be releasing this as a kit later this Summer. I’m looking forward to that release and hope it is the first of many new O Scale kits to be produced from this established HO resin freight car kit manufacturer. This is very promising.
This week I was finally able to get some Dull Coat sprayed on some recent work. Amazing how wet is has been around here when I have had time to work on these cars.
Remember that car that followed me home from the Strasburg Show? well it has been taking a bath.
The Black and the decals came off quickly. But there was a layer of red primer on this cars that was rather stubborn.
But it slowly coming off. The car is cleaning up nicely.
On the possibility of finding an elusive Locomotive Workshop CNJ Double Ender Kit that I mentioned before. The gentleman has located the kit, put a price on it and has agreed to sell it. He wants to hand deliver the kit to me at an upcoming show. I can do that. One step closer.
A strange thing happened to me at the Chicago Show in 2019, a PRR B6sb followed me home. First is was priced so well, I couldn’t pass it up. That was mostly because it had a very bad paint job.
After spending some time being converted to Proto48 by Carl Jackson, this fine looking model came home with me on Saturday. During the time the model was with Carl it had the chance to take a bath in his stripping tank. It needed it!
Now that all that ugly paint is gone, it revealed a couple of things the bad paint was hiding. It appears the previous owner had a mishap with the tender. The railings appear to have been damaged at one time. A repair attempt has resulted with too much heat being applied, which caused the rear tender deck to seperate from the side. There is also a little separation along the top rim of the coal bunker. So, I have some repair work to do before I can think about painting this model.
Next up was another model that came home from this past weekend’s show. It’s an RY Models Reading welded 55 ton twin hopper. It also is suffering from a case of bad paint. This time the issue was in the weathering attempt.
This is a good reason why you learn to paint and weather freight cars using a $20 Weaver car, not a brass model.
My first thought was to try to salvage the paint by just cleaning up the weathering. Better sense took over, rather than try to fix the bad weathering, I’ll just start over. So into the stripping tank for this one. I can say that with a little help from a toothbrush every few hours this model is now almost back to brass. I figure it will be done later today.
I had a visitor to my workbench this week. My friend Michael Rahilly’s PRR SW-9 came in for some quick work. He wanted to change the wheelsets and it needed a repair to the footboards on the from pilot. These were the before images.
It happened that it was sharing time on the workbench with a couple of other SW9’s. That is former SW9/NW2 project looking more like a SW9 again on the left. The CNJ unit was getting the Right-O-Way retainer plates installed.
I started to go through the models that were painted, decaled but awaiting weathering. When I discovered that my H30 still needed trucks and couplers installed.
Bolsters added and painted. Couplers installed and checked with the height gauge. All is good with the world. These will be next in line when I get a chance to weather some models. Hopefully soon.
