doctorwayne's Get off yer duff Challenge (Part III)

[doctorwayne]

Well, I've finally got some progress to be shown.  I had been holding it back, since the methods I'm about to show were somewhat experimental, and I was uncertain about how successful they might be.
As it turns out, my decision to wait was well-founded, as the results are less promising than I had hoped.  However, the following words and pictures may prove useful to others, so here's a look at how I screwed-up.      

This first part turned out okay, as it shows the method I used to add weight to this car.  The weights, one in each end of the car, were cast in lead specifically to fit this car, so they're the full interior width of the car so that they can sit atop the interior .125"x.125" styrene strips which reinforce the car's sides.  To hold them in place, I cemented short pieces of the same strip material to the car's sides, trapping the weights in place both vertically and horizontally...



The finished car weighs almost exactly six ounces.     I'm giving it only one thumb-up, though, as I later realised that the weights block interior access to the car's ends, making it difficult to secure some of the exterior add-on details, especially on the car's "B"-end.     I did eventually manage it okay, but I've made a mental note to myself about this issue...hope I can find it next time.  

While I wasn't yet ready to add those external details, I did have to figure out how they were to be done before I could continue.  The biggest issue seemed to be with the car's grabirons, which on the prototype are the bracket-style.  I cursed the idiot who dreamt-up this style, as I've not found any HO scale ones that accurately replicate the real ones:  some are too bulky, others are well-done, but in engineering plastic, which cannot be secured to the car's sides.  Intermountain makes one on which the bracket portion is solid (rather than open like the real ones), and since it's rather small and not too apparent, I opted for that version.
Here's a photo of some real ones, courtesy of Ted Culotta's excellent book Focus on Freight Cars - Volume 4:  Steel Box Cars.  The photo, scanned from my copy of the book, has been cropped, but may have been originally from the collection of Dan Smith, via the late Richard Hendrickson...



As you can see, the real ones have two bolts or rivets holding each bracket to the car, and another two bolts or rivets holding the grab iron to the brackets - six potential points of failure which could have resulted in injury or death to a switchman!  

Unfortunately I didn't have any such Intermountain grabs on-hand (I did have the other types mentioned above, just so you know that I've explored my options).  I introduced a fourth option, and simply built my own.
Here's one, with its faux brackets ....




Now to the experimental part of the construction.  Since this is meant to represent a metal boxcar, what better material to use for the sheathing than...metal?!!
In this case, it's aluminum, in the form of duct tape....not the cloth-like stuff with which most of us are familiar, but actual aluminum metal in tape form.
Mine came on a roll about 5" in diameter, with the tape about 3" wide, and weighs about a pound and a half.  This is an industrial grade tape, and is, I'm told, rather expensive.  The roll, however, will probably do several hundred boxcars.

Here's the first panel in place.  The adhesive is very strong, but the bond is increased by rapidly burnishing the surface, the heat caused by this action apparently causes a reaction within the adhesive:



Each successive panel overlaps the previous one...





Here's a panel not yet burnished in place...



And a couple of views of the completely-clad car:





After all of the panels were in place, I used the edge of a #11 blade to apply ca along each overlapping joint.  My thought was that the tape-on-tape bond might be more susceptible to drying out over time, and that perhaps the ca would prevent that.  This step later came back to haunt me.

To be continued...