12-21-2011, 11:21 PM
Green_Elite_Cab Wrote:Unfortuneately, I just realized that those NJ DOT units might be beyond my capability. They were rebuilt by the Paducah shops not long after NJ DOT acquired them. During this process, they removed the front door, and replaced the "paneling" with plane sheet metal. Though I already knew I would have to fill in and sand down the port holes, I hadn't realized that i'd also need to remove all the panel strips as well.
It's difficult to tell from the photo, but I assume you're referring to the batten strips between body panels. Did they remove only the vertical ones or the horizontal ones, too? It seems an odd thing to do - replacing one or two damaged panels would seem easier than re-doing the whole side of the carbody. :?
Filling in the lines around the nose door is done fairly easily with body putty - the grabirons shouldn't be in place for painting anyway. Fill and sand, and repeat as necessary.
Green_Elite_Cab Wrote:I'm not sure if there is a safe way to do this on the model without being very VERY careful. It seems like it could be a difficult proposition to scrape all of that off and then polish it. Its certainly one of those things that, Once you begin, you can't turn back!
If you need to remove only the vertical battens, careful work with a #17 blade (sharpen it often as you work) will do the trick. Removing the long one at the belt line is more work, obviously, but it involves only the area between the doors and to the rear of the unit. A block of wood inside the body shell will keep the sides from bowing as you work and it's possible to do this so that no filling and only minimal sanding is required. Take your time, and don't work on it for too long in a single sitting. To avoid gouging the areas alongside the battens, use a cut-off disc in your Dremel to slightly round the corners of the blade.
Another option is to remove the offending areas and replace them with a new, one-piece replacement made from sheet styrene. This method could be tricky if the belt line batten is involved, though, as you'd be replacing the entire area between the sill batten and the one beneath the grillwork. In that case, it might be easier to remove the entire area between the doors and the one between the middle door and the back end, from below the grillwork right down to, and including, the bottom rivet strip. With these cut-out pieces laying flat on your workbench, it would be relatively simple to cut the sill batten strips free, then re-attach them to the new styrene side panels.
This panel replacement was done on a smaller scale, as I needed only to relocate the vertical batten strips and add sand fill hatches.
Wayne