These are great models! Well thought out and excellent instructions! The kit builds into a highly detailed “brass model quality” piece.
If you have experiance building a few more technical kits, you can build one of these kits! However, they are not shake the box kits and take several evenings to complete! The effort is rewarded with as detailed a caboose as you can buy. You will need trucks and couplers to complete. An interesting aside is that many parts are not glued, but have adhesive backing which allows placement of the part on to the model.
This review should apply to all the cabeese made by AMB
AMB is to be congratulated! They are providing kits for specific series cabooses for many roads. Previously the only way you could obtain one of these cabeeses was to buy brass!
Any chance of seeing some photos when your finished? I’m waiting for two CN Wood Caboose kits by Juneco to arrive. Unfortunately I don’t think these kits come with adhesive strips. The couple of structure kits I have built with adhesive backings are excellent and I recommend them highly.
Unless Juneco has retooled their caboose kits, you are probably in for a major disappointment! Their original kits are/were very crude and took a lot of work to make look anyway decent. The worst part is the cupola, made from four very heavy and coarse white metal castings. With some work they can be made to look halfway decent, but they do not compare in any way to modern kits. I’ve built both the CN and two of the CP version a long time ago.
A great way to learn how to improve these kits though!
Deschane–agree with you completely. I built their laser-kit version of the SP C-30 wooden caboose, and it’s wonderful. Everything goes just where it’s supposed to go, and if you follow the instructions, you can have a well-crafted model in about six or seven hours. And the ‘peel and stick’ technique is a real time-saver–I think I only used about 9 or 10 dabs of gap-filling CA cement for the entire kit. The fun part, though, is finding the appropriate trucks–THAT’S tricky!
Which trucks did you use?? I have two AMB c-30 kits and just finished superdetailing three of the walthers C-30s. The AMBs need trucks and the Walther’s trucks have so much slop that they need replacing. Just curious.
I used Accurail Andrews trucks for my N.P. caboose. These trucks were modified by drilling 3/32nds diameter holes from each side, where the coil springs are. This allows me to make up some wedge shaped leaf springs from wood and insert them in the holes. I carved some spring detail on these wedge shaped parts and painted them roof brown and rust. They provide serviceable caboose trucks.
Trainnut: Re-appropriate trucks–I still haven’t found anything that I really like. I finally settled on the Athearn caboose trucks, replacing the wheels with P2K’s, but of course the Athearns’ are too ‘new’ to be prototypical. But I’m still looking–maybe Kadee or Intermountain might have something–. Just got the new 2004 Walther’s catalogue, maybe I’ll find something in there. Frankly, I wish I could get ahold of the old Silver Streak leaf-spring caboose trucks, they were just right for the C-30, since the Silver Streak caboose was largely based upon that model.
Tom