SOME FREIGHT CAR MODIFICATIONS...

[doctorwayne]

The doors on the sides of the cinder car are flat plate steel, with angle iron rivetted to the exterior edges.  Similar angle irons are rivetted to the car's exterior above and inboard of those on the doors, and there's a bolt or hinge-pin through each. 
When the latch on the bottom of the door is lifted, and thereby disengaged from the keeper beneath the door, the door can be swung open. 

While the doors on the model will not be operable, I thought that the hinge-pins should be included.  However, on the model, they'll be only .025"-.030" long, and therefore very difficult to handle.

With no particular plan in place, I cut the doors from some .005" thick sheet styrene, then used .010"x.040" strip styrene and some .010"x.060" strip to create the angle irons.  The door plates were installed first, then I added the angle irons to them, and then installed the short angles on the car's sides.  That's when my plan for drilling the holes in the angle irons came to me....after they had all been cemented to the car.  

Undeterred, I used my dividers to punch starter holes in the angle irons, then used a #79 bit in my pin vise to drill holes (naturally at an angle due to them being only semi-accessible) through each pair.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, I usually cut wire (brass or phosphor-bronze) using the heel of an well-worn X-Acto #11 blade.  As long as you take care to restrain both the main piece of wire and the piece being cut off, this yields a nice clean cut, which can be very precisely executed,  Unfortunately, in this case the cut-off pieces are pretty short for holding-on-to or for picking up, even with tweezers.

Since my work surface is glass, and too slippery for the next operation, I applied a small piece of masking tape to the glass.  After laying a length of .125" phosphor-bronze wire on the tape, I applied the heel of the knife about .025"-.030" from the end of the wire, and gently rolled the wire back-and-forth several times, using light pressure on the knife...



The back-and-forth rolling scored the wire's circumference, thereby weakening it (the little bits in the photo above are the result of either too much pressure on the knife, or too many rolls of the wire).
Next, the end of the wire is inserted into one of the pre-drilled holes....



...and is then grasped with small, smooth-jawed pliers,  and flexed up-and-down a couple of times, thereby breaking off the short piece, leaving it where it can be cemented in place....



Even with a close-up view, the hinge-pins aren't all that noticeable, but I think that their absence would be noticeable...



...as you can see, I also added nut/bolt/washer detail to the grabirons, something I had overlooked previously, so the other four cars will get a similar treatment...if I don't run out of the necessary detail castings.

Holding a loupe to the camera's lense does show more detail, though...



The door latch is a 12" (HO) strip of .010"x.030" brass, with the top 3" bent-over, and a slot (two drilled holes, connected) cut into it.  A nut/bolt/washer casting is inserted into a hole drilled through the door, with only the exterior portion visible.  If you scroll up to the photo of the real car, you can see how the latch would be lifted to free its bottom end, allowing the door to open. 
The short bit of angle-iron was made up of a strip of .005" sheet material cemented beneath the door (the same thickness of the doors) in order to keep the latch vertical.  A piece of .010"x.060" was then cut from strip material, then held in those smooth-jawed pliers and a very small file used to create a cut-out in the edge which mates with the strip already cemented beneath the door.  This provides the slot into which the latch drops.

I hope to get the nbw detail added to the other four cars tomorrow (today, I guess, as it's currently 04:15AM), then get them washed so that I can apply primer later this evening.

More to come.