when I finally got my brass Sunset Limited by Soho, I was looking forward of course to install interiors and figures inside beside the interior lighting. The interior lighting won´t be a problem, BUT installing interiors (by IHC) is a huge problem because for me it seems impossible! It´s because the cars have this batten along the floor which holds the screws! And this prevents me from installing the interiors, which is really p*****g me off! Without this, it would have been so easy: just glue the interiors to the floor, done! But I don´t wanna glue the interiors onto the battens, and I also don´t wanna narrow the interiors because it would look stupid. So what should I do? Should I run my Sunset Limited lighted but totally empty, or should I cut off the batten along the red lines on the third photo and only leave 4 screws holding the carbody together with the floor instead of 6? What would you do? By the way: what´s the best way to cut brass?
Can you not slide the floor in at an angle and then pull it down against the battens? Or is the floor too long to do this, in which case you could shorten the floor a bit at each end where the missing portion would be hidden by the vestibule.
No way! I can slide the car floor in and it´s not too long to do this, BUT: the underside of the floor is full of details like water tanks for example, and they are all located pretty much along the border of the floor. So the battens are again in the way!
Or do you mean the floor of the interior (well, the interior itself)? If you mean it like this, it´s like I wrote already: I don´t want to glue the underside of the interior floor to the battens! It´s not a good and stable solution like glueing it to the car floor. And if there is a problem with the LED lighting one day (you never know…), it would be a very complicated and messy thing to reach the LEDs again! I don´t want that. So for now I don´t see any other way than leaving the cars without interiors or cutting off the battens (which I´m really not sure about if I should do that!)…sadly.
The brass angles are probably soldered to the side sheets right? Thick brass about 1/16 inch thick? Tough cutting with hand tools. Motor tool will generate too much heat and ruin paint jobs. Take your time and use a small fine tooth hand saw. You can probably tell where the angles are soldered to the sides. Maybe most will come out when cut all the way to the sides and then this will give you more room.
As an aside. One of the guys in my club glued silhouettes into the windows and shades and such on his brass passenger equipment. Realistic looking when lit up.
Yes, exactly, they are soldered to the side sheets or car walls as you like. Yes, that´s the thickness. What do you mean with “motor tool will ruin paint jobs”? There is no paint job inside. And outside on this level of the car it´s just pure silver. Do you mean the heat from the inside could ruin the paint outside? Gosh, it´s gonna take ages with a hand saw!!! 14 cars!!! Did you know that the ancient egyptians needed 2 full years to drill out the tub of the granite block that was to become the sarcophagus of Pharao Chufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid? I will like transfered back to these times now! But there is no other way I guess.
Yes, you read my mind! I´m definetly planning to install window shades and blinds, and I thought about the idea with the silhouettes as well. Can you maybe upload a photo of these brass cars equipped with silhouettes (while being lit up)? I would love to see how it looks like! Maybe I really do it too if I like it! That would be awesome!
If it were me, and based upon your photos, I would expertiment with trimming down the interior casting before cutting into the carbody, sure you would end up with some narrow seats, this possibly might provide the needed room to slip into the carbody, if doable you could use the existing screws to also secure the casting.
This is kind of a repeat of Maxman’s question, but can you get the interior inside the car so it can sit on the tops of the brass angles? If so you could glue it to the angles to initially hold it in place and then add more glue to the bottom of the interior when you mount the car floor. That will ensure that it never comes loose.
Even if that works, it still leaves you with the problem that you mentioned of how to disassemble the car if you ever need to do repairs. My suggestion would be to use very small countersunk screws through the brass angles into the interior molding instead of glue. You would have to use a countersink in the brass after drilling the holes to set the screw heads into the brass or they will interfere with installing the car floor. If you are concerned about the screws coming loose, use a little Loctite or CA on them and they will stay in place no matter how rough your track is[swg]. Just kidding about the track.
If you have to trim down the interior to make it fit, my suggestion would be to take a piece of the aisle floor out instead of cutting into the seats. I think that might be less obvious than trimming the seats down. It is not a perfect solution by any means. You also have some material outside of the seats that can be removed. If you take that off and narrow the aisle just a bit you might be able to glue the interior to the car floor and have it slide up between the angles.
Is somewhat a problem. I feel that Dave is on to something here. I would cut the center isle enough to insert the seat portions to sit inside on those channels. Small “C” clamp and drill/ screw them into position. You could add a strip of styrene over the isle if desired and secure w/ dabs of Goo for removal to access the lighting if needed. Note if dry fitting shows this will work, predrill the brass sides to ease the drill tapping for seat screws into the plastic. Any protruding screws along the side walls will never be seen. Small flat head machine screws and drill/ countersink the side plates so that the screw heads can be as flush as possible as not to interfere w/ floor of car and possibly raising the body. I feel this is doable, lot of thought and dry fitting but should work.
Edit: Just reread Dave’s post, he is recommending basically the exact same thing.
Since the interior will fit into the car and can sit atop those brass strips to which the underbody is attached, why not use the screws which hold the underbody in place to also hold the IHC floor in place. If they’re not long enough, replace them with longer ones, then drill and tap the IHC floor in the appropriate places.
Another option would be to clearance-drill the car’s floor - two or three places per car should suffice - then drill and tap corresponding holes in the floor of the IHC interior. Cement a small piece of steel (washer perhaps?) to the top side of the IHC floor, then insert the floor into the car and install the underbody. Next, with the car right side up, use a magnet to re-position the interior until the holes line-up, then insert the screws to hold the interior in place. Not too much extra work to accomplish and completely removeable when necessary.
Were it me,I would follow the two,‘‘Dave’s not here’’ approach,Including,Wayne and Maxman…I don’t feel there is any need to cut anything,from the existing car body…
Wayne, not sure if I’m missing something. How would you hold the interior in position to screw through floor, a threaded body channel and get the plastic aligned for that same screw to catch and thread as it is loose and may flop around.
1). Install all bulkhead walls in the car body first.
2). Cut the interior so that you have two strips of just seats.
3). Glue one strip of seats to the top of one of the battens.
4). Glue a shim the thickness of the batten, and no wider than the gap between the two battens, to the center of the car floor.
5). Glue the second row of seats to the shim on the floor of the car (opposite the side that already has seats), and let it overhang to the depth of the batten. There will be a resulting gap under the floor-mounted seats the size of the un-seated batten.
6). Insert the floor into the car by angling it so that the non-seat batten will slide under the floor-mounted seats.
This idea allows full prototypical seat placement, access to the interior, full bulkheads, and no brass cutting. You also could buy the seats separate (Red Cap, Pikestuff, Palace Car Co., Precision Scale or Rapido) and use them vs. cutting them out of the IHC interiors.
Pete,
Silhouettes? Really? Take a $100 to $200 car and make it look like a $5.00 Tyco? Ick.
Silhouettes are not realistic. At night, when you see a lit passenger car window, you never see a silhouette, you see the interior of the car. Even if the shade was fully drawn, they are heavy duty and do not let any light through in either direction. So one can’t get a silhouette from that, either.
That’s the purpose of cementing a small steel washer to the top surface of the IHC interior’s floor - it will allow you to use a magnet to manipulate the interior from below with a magnet.
I do agree that attempting to line-up two threaded holes for insertion of a screw could be problematic, so if the IHC floor is of sufficient thickness, you could drill-out the holes in the brass angle to a clearance size, and screw directly into only the IHC floor. That’s why I offered the second alternative of separate screw locations to hold the interior in-place atop the brass underbody. Also, it would probably be useful to use at least
Thanks for everybodys help, but I think that Pauls method is the best one! Thank you! That sounds really good and not too difficult! Eeven if I would glue both seat rows onto the batten, there would still be enough space to access the LED stripe glued to the ceiling. But your method is better: one seat row can be “pulled out”, so there is definetly enough access to the LED stripes! Great! This method will also work great for the Pride of Texas Coffe Shop and Audubon Diner, because even the prototype had pretty much the same seat arrangement in the dining area, and the tables and seats of the IHC diner interior are as wide as the coach seats, so there is really no problem with using for the Diner and Coffe Shop. The kitchen area of both cars will also be glued to that shim, so that should work out too. About the French Quarter Lounge: I will use an IHC observation interior for it, because the seats in the Lounge always faced the opposite window, and positioned like this they are narrow enough to be glued onto the battens because they don´t take away much space. The barber shop and shower bath interior will just have a wall as interior which seperates the rooms from the gangway. Same thing goes for the Baggage Dormitory: the baggage area will stay empty, while the dormitory area will just have a wall that seperates the rooms from the gangway. I will not insert any other walls to seperate the rooms in the Lounge and the Baggage Dormitory. That won´t be visible so much anyway, because I will install many window blinds in this train: the toilet and restroom areas of all cars will have their window blinds pulled down to the maximum, so no interior will be needed there since it won´t be visible anyway. Same goes for the dormitory area of the Baggage Dormitory and rooms of the Lounge: the windows are small, and on many of them the blinds will be totally pulled down, so you can´t look inside (on the real train the barber shop was never used, so I guess the blinds were down in this room
De Luxe,
1). When I said bulkhead walls, I was more talking about major crosswise walls that extend all the way across from side wall to side wall. Walls that run lengthwise to the car can probably be installed on the car floor (and at less than full height…few will look at these from below track height). Full width bulkhead walls probably can’t be slipped into the car if attached to the car floor because you’ll be inserting one side of the car floor into the car body at a pretty shallow angle (and not straight in). Try it out before going too hog wild on this.
2). For shim material… Hmm… You’ll probably get a better bond to the seats (which will be critical) if you use a plastic shim. It’s also a lot easier to work with than brass.
BTW, on the seats attached to the floor, I would keep some of the “aisle” part attached to the seats to give you more gluing surface.
about 1: I absolutely don´t have any plans to install any bulkhead walls. So this won´t be an issue for me. Of course I will glue the lengthwise walls to the car floor. This will be the case in the Baggage Dormitory, Coffee Shop, Diner and Lounge. And yes, I will shorten all walls to a height as high as the lower edge of the red letterboard, which is just a little bit above the upper edge of the window frames. So there will be more than enough space for the LED stripe (which is glued to the ceiling), and separating the car floor from the car body shouldn´t be a problem with walls this high.
about 2: Yes, I was also thinking about plastic shims. I would never use brass shims because I don´t wanna make this train unnecessarily heavier than it already is. I actually have the problem that the first 3 cars of my consist (RPO-Baggage, Baggage Dormitory & Divided Coach) derail in my curves because of 2 reasons: the huge weight of all the following 11 heavy brass cars behind them and my 20 inch curves. The cars run perfectly through my 20 inch curves, but the combination of a radius this tight and the huge train weight forces the first 3 cars of my consist to derail. So I will be forced to install additional weights into the first 3 cars, which will be an interesting issue. In the RPO-Baggage I will have much place to install weights, while in the Baggage Dormitory the space for the weights is limited to the Baggage area and the crew-room area (not the gangway of course). Since most of the window blinds in the Baggage Dormitory will be pulled down to the maximum, I won´t need to take care about additional interiors for the rooms, so this space can be filled with weights. The Divided Coach will be the most interesting project: Here I will ad as much weight as possible into the toilet/restroom area above the trucks, and I will ad additional weights at the underside of the floor. When I paint them in the same silver color like the other underbody details, it won´
