Adding a Flat Car To the Roster

Great Northern 61631 ready for the roster

 Over the last few weeks I have been working on this older Walthers "shake the box" flat car kit. I wanted to try some new (to me) detailing steps on this 42 foot flat car in addition to just assembling the kit. In trying to match my rolling stock standards, I also ended up trying some new approaches. The two new detailing steps I tackled were replacing the cast on grab irons with metal ones and adding a real wood deck. 

Here on my cluttered workbench, the grab iron process is under way. Working carefully with X-Acto #11 and #18 blades I was able to remove the cast on grab irons without significant damage to the other molded details or my fingers. I soon regretted removing them because while fashioning grab irons with the Tichy .008 wire was doable, installing them was, at best, frustrating. After getting one installed, I changed approaches. I found I had some Details West .019 wire in the parts drawer. It is oversize, but I didn't have any .0125. Thanks to a suggestion from Chuck Diljak on a Thursday night Zoom meeting I made a fixture to form the grab iron bends, so they came out somewhat consistently in size. Drilling the holes consistently was another matter. At any rate, I now had wire grabs on the ends and sides of the flat car. Definitely first time quality, but there. 

Fashioning the wood deck went much smoother. After measuring the plastic deck width and sanding it with a sanding block, I cut the 80 pieces I needed. Using my chopper set to the width of the car deck, I carefully cut the Northeastern Scale Lumber HO scale 2" X 6" to length. The care was needed to successfully keep my shaky  fingers out of the razor blade guillotine. I then stained the deck planks a few at a time in a mixture of my alcohol stain and a few extra drops of grimy black paint in a yogurt cup. After they all were stained and removed, I left them to dry overnight. Gluing them to the sanded deck with white glue went easily, with an occasional check with a small hand square. 

With my two detailing experiments completed, it was on to following the kit directions and trying to meet my rolling stock standards. With the metal weight included in the kit (rust sanded off and primed with rattle can primer) and metal wheels, the flat car was still below NMRA RP-20.1 weight. Even though I glued a combination of lead shot and "Liquid Gravity" between the center sills and along the trough beside the steel weight, it continues to be slightly under weight. One new approach that I tried was to paint the wheels with an enamel paint marker that I had on hand. While in the past I found that I didn't like using the paint markers for rails, it made easy work of painting the metal wheel fronts. Even after washing with alcohol, wheels painted with acrylics scratch easily. I later used the marker to touch up the wire grabs that had their acrylic paint flake off with barely any effort. I am hopeful that the use of enamel paint will make for more secure paint application for delicate areas. The paint marker is a breeze for my shaky hands, and clean up is negligible. 

After installing Kadee 148 Whisker couplers and installing the freshly painted trucks and metal wheels, I thought I was close to being done. Well, not so fast! Not only did the car look too high on the trucks as seen in this photo, the couplers tested too high on my test track. The problem was that the hole in the trucks didn't fit well enough onto the bolster post to slide down into position. Actually, after enlarging the hole with a round jeweler's file and testing the now too low coupler height, I realized that the problem was that the post was too large. I was able to cut a slit into red Kadee washers to fit over the oversized post and that brought the coupler height into alignment on my test track. After some paint touch up and installing the oversize brake wheel that came with the kit, I deemed it ready for inclusion on my roster as seen on the opening photo. After the inevitable banging off of the brake wheel occurs, I hope to have picked up a more appropriate one to replace it. 

While I still need to fashion a lumber load to fit this flat car and bring it up to proper weight, I think that I may return to experimenting with a next layer of scenery next.