Bought two on different occasions but from the same stock at my LHS.
One of the bars on the end underfloor gate fell off on each one. Same piece on both cars.
Since there are three per car this seems an odd coincidence. The other two bars are fine on each car.
Mind you Bowser doesn’t charge much for these.
Seems like an easy fix.
These are the 40 foot modified tall chip cars?
How are they overall, was thinking of getting some myself for when running a 1970s train.
Maybe you should just let the chips fall where they may…
Just fixed them with liquid cement.
My mild objection to the defect is the box is marked fully assembled which implies that they will at least reach the track in that state.
Having said that for the price these are very good. Multimark. Plastic knuckle couplers and metal wheelsets in what look very like Accurail trucks.
Riddell’s books have a photo in each volume of these modified hoppers. A steel extension was welded to the top to increase volume if a lightweight product. Both the Riddell examples are marked for the East Coast Dominion Atlantic Railway (DAR) and the models are not. Also the Riddell photos are Canadian Pacific script. Two of the three hopper doors face the B end whereas the models are the other arrangement. Models are numbered 356000 series which are not the ones Riddell photos show, they’re 358000 series.
How railroad nerdy is that…
Alyth,
Watching some of Rapido’s factory tours and seeing the assembly process might lead me to think that perhaps the assembler places the glue for the three bars in one operation, then sets the cross-ties in place. By the time the third one is set in the cement is beginning to cure already?
I’ve assembled dozens of similar Bowser hoppers and the drawback with these small parts is that you’re gluing paint to paint. Liquid plastic cement just evaporates without bonding to bare plastic.
ACC-type glues can be a problem, too. Best advice is to carefully scrape the paint away.
The hopper latches are a bigger problem for me. I often find them along the weeds in the right-of-way. Then I have to go a hunting to find the car they popped off of.
[2c] Cheers, Ed
From my earliest memories of Revell, AMT, and Aurora kits, the instructions carefully noted to scrape away paint or plating from where parts were to be cemented.
Of course, in those days Revell either forgot to clean the parting agent from trees to be plated or used improper surface activation, as the glues of the era (notably the Styro-Weld of sainted memory) would neatly displace the plating – as would skin oil or casual contact! Same was often true of painted parts: the solvent would soften the paint film and reach the polymer under it to soften that, too, with the paint film essentially becoming inclusions in the resulting joint when pressure was applied.
I would still ‘rough up’ painted joints with the tip of a #1 X-acto or equivalent before gluing. This was all with tube glues that had some kind of plastic material dissolved with their solvents acting as ‘vehicle’ so there was a secondary “plastic” bond in the joint.
HSince the same bar fell off each car and the other two bars did not I agree with the three step glue process as the likely QA failure.
The degree of attachment varied from model to model with one getting sort of knocked off while the other fell off while in the box.
I did not scrape the “paint” first so we’ll see how my repair fairs. The solvent cement I use transfers material from parts to my fingertips so something is getting removed. It’s one of the Plastruct solvents good for ABS as well as other plastics. I like the evaporative characteristics as the solvent doesn’t damage the plastic surface unless you touch something to it while wet. It does seem to remove most paints though. If you touch the wet spots before evaporation.
My 1/87 hobos must be scouring my track ditches constantly given how many itty bitty parts just disappear.
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