doctorwayne's 2013 Get Off Your Duff Challenge - Part 2

[doctorwayne]

Well, it's high time I got busy on the next Challenge, which is to create new, non-sagging floors for these three Tyco reefers (2386 shows the sag best, but all three cars suffer from it). They'll also need some added brake detail:








With the delay in Part 1 of my Challenge (to refurbish the extra car from the parts box), these cars sat on the workbench for sometime, and the longer they sat, the more I was bothered by both the steel ends (rather unusual on a wood reefer supposedly built in the late teens or early '20s):



...and the steel roof, with fairly small hatches on the ice bunkers, not to mention the cast-on roofwalks:



I felt that these cars needed a more severe makeover, so I decided to replace the ends and roofs, at the same time shortening the cars to about 36', still quite common in my late '30s modelling era:



While I was busy sawing, I remembered that I had another of these cars on the layout, and decided to upgrade it, too. It already had a new floor, but the ends and roof had to go. Since this car will also be shortened, the floor will be used on something else:



The carnage:



I used a utility knife to remove the roofs, and after a little touch-up with some sandpaper, I was left with this:



Because the car sides are not the same thickness at the top as they are at the bottom (this is due to the draught angle, which facilitates removing the casting from the mould - you can see this if you look closely at the photo showing the cars with their ends removed), I cut new ends from a sheet of Evergreen car siding and cemented them onto the cars' ends. This material is only .030" thick, so I wanted to strengthen the ends by adding a sheet of .060" sheet styrene to the interior at each end. Rather than attempt to match the draught angle (wide at the bottom and narrower at the top), I cut a long strip of material the same width as the top dimension, then traced the roof peaks from the already-installed ends. After cutting out all of the sub-ends, they were cemented to the inside of the ends. Here's one before installation:



And a look at one in place. Note that it doesn't touch the car's sides except right at the top - not much of a reinforcement at this point:



To complete the strengthening, I added lengths of .125"x.125" strip, bonding them to both the sub-ends and the sides of the car. ( The short lengths of .080" strip material seen near the bottom of the interior sides is blocking to position the floors.):



To finish the ends, Evergreen .080" channel was added to represent end sills:





Coming next: new floors.

Wayne