Container wagons are an important component of the modern era, so back in October when my better half was off overseas for a few weeks, I dug up the casting supplies I’d been hoarding since last century with a view to making some.
A few masters were whipped up from plasticard - they are far less ugly from a nominal two foot viewing distance than close up, so I’m going to be generous and score myself seven out of 10 for these. The proliferation of styrene strips of all sizes and shapes certainly makes scratchbuilding easier than it used to be for those of us whose surname isn’t Boul. That man is a black belt plastic wizard.
OK, so that’s the easy bit, but then it was time to tentatively make my first molds since some pretty mediocre efforts in the early 1990s. With a bit of well timed advice from Rhys about brushing the master with rubber before doing the main pour, I was rewarded next morning with these nice blue bubble-free wobbly jobs…
On to casting…. Although the rubber exceeded my low expectations, the resin (which I later discovered had “Use by 8/99” stamped on the bottom of it) wasn’t really up to the task with at least a 50% failure rate. The stuff just wouldn’t cure consistently, but I did get a few reasonable successes by early November.
The first wagons weren’t too stiff, so I placed some strip brass in with the resin which helped a little, but the real coup occurred when I was ordering new resin and found that my pusher of materials and tools has not only a “quick” resin with a short mix time that sets in about 15 minutes; but also a 16-48 hour cure “high strength” resin. This has turned out to be perfect for the wagons but I’ve also been using it for a few containers as well as the high strength stuff is only a little thicker than water so it flows into all the nooks and crannies and the long cure time lets most of the air bubbles escape. I’ve also found that by filling the container molds about 2/3rds full and then squeezing it from all sides stretches the rubber which allows the resin get into all the details such as the rodding on the green side opening containers which you can see more clearly on the later 10 footers than in my early experiments with the 20s above.
Over the last week or so I’ve made a few UKs as well (that’s lens warp rather than a bent UK before you ask!). The containers provide rigidity over the thinnest part of the wagon chassis, but the high strength resin alone seems stiff enough to run empty flat wagons and a rake of these looks pretty neat actually. Insert Tranz Rail Beard Era joke here. The addition of a little weight helps them track nicely as the resin, even with a couple of containers on board, is pretty light. I have been using both shotgun pellets (thanks to the Blogmeister for that idea) and thin lead squares (I assume its lead) from dental Xrays folded up. You can just see these in the following pic.
For the PKs, I’m using bogie mounted MT trucks but have cut the couplers off to be body mounted on the UKs to keep the bogies about where they should be. I do like the PKs - the shorter wagons look better on curves and trains seem longer if they have more vehicles in them. Something a little different:
I only got four and a half of these HCCs out before the mold became unusable – too many nooks and crannies!
1 comment:
Very good Kbonds.
Interesting reading and good results.
Keep it up!
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