I made a cursory look around the train show last week for some vehicles that would be used in 1950, and I found only one that would work in that time frame, and that was a 1937 Ford. But the sticker price was $12.99.
I looked at it and it looked good and was probably worth that, but if I need a hundred cars or so for my downtown layout that price will exceed the track, turnouts, structures, and engines combined. In fact, it will exceed combined cost of everything else if I exclude the rolling stock.
So it seems to me this might be a job for resin casting. I might get say 5 good models and make a mold.
Has anyone else done this? Are there better alternatives?
That’s kind of a stretch. A home-made resin copy of a model isn’t going to approach the quality of the original. If he buys each of the models, and only uses the copies (and the originals) for personal use, I don’t think there’s any issue here. NOTE: I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t even watch them on TV.
Athearn has just put out a series of 1930’s autos. The MSLP is $9.99, I think. They’re nice.
Ayup, those glorious diecast metal HO scale vehicles are expensive. Some things to try. Lifelike used to make, maybe still does make, molded plastic vehicles that sold in three packs for a couple of bucks. They aren’t as nifty as the diecast metal jobs, but they were good enough to serve as loads for my tri level auto rack car. Adding black construction paper floors to the cars improved them a lot. As they come out of the box, you can look in the windshield and see the road under the car.
Then try Walmart. They have a line of 1:87 toy cars in cute black boxes going for maybe $2 a car. I saw a VW beetle and a '57 Chevy, along with a lot of Euro sports cars of the Ferrari, Lamborgini ilk.
Then you might be able to work in some Matchbox cars and trucks. The Matchbox cars are oversize, too big to serve as loads (they won’t fit) but they might work in foreground applications, with a little forcing of perspective. The Matchbox trucks are usually better sized for HO. Matchbox was into “box scale” for a long time, i.e. the toys were scaled to fit the box, so the larger trucks came out a smaller scale than the cars.
Then there used to be some folk making resin cast HO vehicles, they were sold unpainted for not very much. If you can get a decent paint job onto the resin they could be quite good looking.
Just as Mr. Beasley stated, it’s not stealing if the copies are for personal use. This is the same idea when backing up DVD’s or CD’s to prolong the life of the original. As long as the copied cars aren’t made to be sold, then the OP can cast as many cars as he wants. I have the same dilemma as the OP and it didn’t occur to me to make copies of the cars, now I have a good idea to look into.
I think by the time you make the molds, cast them, clean them up, paint them, detail them, add wheels, figure out what your going to do for glass in 100+ vehicles, that $10-$12 price tag isn’t going to look so bad. Unless you have a plaque on your wall that says “SUPER MASTER MODELER” you’ll probably like the look of the store bought ones better.[2c]
Having dabbled in casting other things (no model RR stuff yet) I tend to agree with Loather’s comments. One thing I have found is unless you have oodles of time to spend on it (or you are having them produced in bulk in China), it may not prove much of a cost saver in the end. Just my two [2c] worth. Hope there is a good solution to your dilemma.
I’m assuming you’re planning to use these for “background cars” that don’t need a lot of detail. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of models around for cars from the late 40’s, particularly not in the Wal-Mart price range.
I have a small pile of what someone here referred to as “birthday cake cars.” They’re cheap plastic, something like HO scale, and they have wheels and metal axles. The windows are all solid, and they are single-color unless I painted them. You might find something like these in party stores. I’ve got one that I started reworking by painting it and drilling out the windows, so I can add that “liquid glass” stuff. I got part way into the project and then found the exact model I wanted at my LHS, so right now it’s just one more piece of clutter on my workbench.
So it looks like you have about 25 linear feet of roads on that layout. And you’re going to install one car every 4 inches? Dude! That’s worse gridlock than the Fort Duquesne Bridge after a Steelers game!
But if you really want it that dense, fill in further from the front of the scene with cheaper autos. Even the cheap ones will probably look better than molds from other models. You shoudl look at Eko (in walthers) and Bachmann and some of the other cheapos. With a little paint, they can fill in toward the back.
Alloy Forms kits are pretty nice and are available on-line for 6 or 7 bucks each. They have some to fit your era.
Look into a line called Greg’s Garage. These are resin vehicles and are available in kits or finished. I buy them at the local shows here in Michigan. The only listing I have seen on line for them is:
I think that maybe is still exagerrated. That photo is what, 400 feet by 1200 feet in the real world? What you are building is more like 300 X 500 feet in HO. It’s compressed by 3 to 1 in area. So you only need about 1/3 the cars you’ve counted and it will look about the same.
And why you would think it’s critical to duplicate every car in an aerial photo is puzzling. Especially when money seems to be so tight. Seems like it would be more fun to focus on what you can do rather than to throw up all these roadblocks for yourself by making it look harder than it is. One man thinks he can, another man thinks he cannot. Both are correct.
I’ll second the recommendation on Greg’s Garage. The unpainted versions paint up very easily. They look just fine from a distance of 2’ or more, their lack of detail becomes increasingly obvious as the range closes.
I’ll suggest that more than the cost, your issue with the number of vehicles you plan to place is that even to the casual observer, it will be apparent that many of them are the same model.
I’ll echo the previous sentiments–the principle works the same as foreground/background buildings or scenery. Get a couple of the $12.95 detailed cars, and put those in the foreground. Then get a bunch of the cheap Life-Like cake toppers and a few things scrounged from train-show bargain bins for a quarter apiece, slap on a bit of paint, and set them farther back. You have a problem similar to mine in that your backdrop is not very far from your foreground, but that just means that a half-dozen model cars can take the place of sixty that might have been on the prototype.
If you use the older Life-Like trucks, you’ll have to repaint them. They’re usually molded in odd colors, and the red ones aren’t opaque Also, they have a huge mold pin in the bed…which is a pain to remove. Put some empty boxes, or a tonneau cover over it.
I’m not actually going to build it based on the aerial photos, but rather on photos taken at ground level. It may or may not work out to the same number of cars. It is now and was then a buy street and there would be lots of cars pulled in at an angle. But the layout will end up being 218 x 1217 scale feet.
You’re also right that I shouldn’t be making it an obstacle. In fact, I won’t be. I only plan to get the track working with cardboard representation before I switch over to the Rock Ridge layout for 6 months or so.
One man thinks he can, another man thinks he cannot. Both are correct.
I’ve been picking up a few things for my yet to be built layout including some die cast vehicles from late 30’s to mid 60’s on eBay and have been very satisfied. Search accessories and buildings under ho trains. Hope we don’t bid against each other. lol
Most of the ‘Fresh Cherry’ and similar cars at WalMart are 60s and later models, there are a few earlier ones (I just got a 39 VW beetle), but they are few and far between especially after the diecast collectors get done with the supply.
Alloy Forms has quite a few cast metal model car and truck kits for the late 40s and 50s
Sheepscot Scale Products has craftsman kit quality (not anything like that resin flatcar you were talking about recently) trucks, truck bodies and trailers from the 30s to 60s. http://www.sheepscotscale.com/. They are stocked by Walthers, but it would be a good idea to check the Walthers online catalog for availability. If you need a heavy truck from that timeframe, this is the place to look.
Sylvan Scale has a good selection of resin kits of 30s to 50s vintage cars and trucks. They are thin wall castings with interiors and driver figures. Often Canadian vehicles, but similar models were produced in the US. http://www.isp.ca/sylvan
There used to be a company called Stoney Mountain Classic Castings that had a line of solid cast resin cars and trucks. They went out of business in the early 90s, but you might try a search for them on E-Bay. Also, Walthers had a few 50s vintage cast resin vehicles that are now out of production, but may also be an evil-bay possibility.
