Well this all started with Rosy’s caboose, I had a cupola to use, but needed railings, catwalks, ladders and grab rails, found a complete Bachmann caboose on EBay for $10.50 and free shipping less the chassis, ladders alone were priced at $10.95 + $3.95 shipping. No brainer except I wound up with another cupola. What to do, what to do.!!! In my array of goodies I found a Kalamazoo combine, looked like the start of a drovers caboose to me. Had railings but no catwalk, ladders or upper roof railing. I liked to size of the Kalamazoo car as it was a fair amount shorter than LGB or Bachmann cars and fits better with small engine trains. I thought this is going to be easy, there was no interior in the Kalamazoo car and figured it would be easy to paint by just separating the chassis from the body and wouldn’t have to tape off anything!!! Wrong Kalamazoo glues their body to the chassis and there is no floor in the car, the floor is part of the chassis. Well after some sawing with a razor saw and a fair amount of acetone dropped into the joints + some carful prying it finally came apart. Only minor damage was done to both chassis and body and was easy to cover up.
There were end car railings and grab bars on the combine, just no ladders. Measuring the existing bars I found that they were 1/16" brass rod so I started the ladders and designed them around the existing end car railings over lapping as to reuse as much as possible and reuse existing holes in chassis. Ladders were something that I had done before but not well so this time I took a little more time. Cut 1/16" brass wire and attached by soldering rungs to the up rights, trimming excess from ends when done. Also, while soldering, I made the upper walk railing using the same technique as I did with the Sinclair Dino tank using brass tubing and cotter pins soldered together and tapping the ends and screwing into roof at predrilled and tapped holes that I had made.
Well done, thanks for the share.
I really like the lighting.