I am determined to have a couple of these open hopper converted to covered hopper conversions done by the July show in Strasburg, and since I had nothing else better to do but twiddle my thumbs waiting for the hospital to call back (all came out fine, thank God), I finally got back to work on them. I cut out another piece of the roof material, and this time I used a proper sanding sealer (found some at the LHS months ago, never got around to doing anything with it) and now I have a roof piece that, other than seeing the grain, you probably wouldn;t know it was wood. A color coat over this and you won;t see the grain, either. At 3 coats with sanding in between so far, it’s probbaly good enough but I’m goign to hit it one more time. Rubbing a fingernail across the surface - there is no grain. That’s what I’m after, perfectly smooth like a piece of plastic, to represent steel.
Why not plastic? Because to make the roof in plastic requires a pair of peaked ends, and an overhanging flat piece creased in the middle to get the roof angle. The overhanging wood roof stock from Micro Mark is precisely the width of the Accurail hopper cars used as the basis for this conversion, and a little time with some danding sealer and sandpaper and no one will be able to tell I didn;t fabricate the roof from individual pieces of plastic.
Roofwalks, hatches, locking bars, etc will be made from stryene and metal, corner grabs I have Tichy pre-bent ones. Hopper outlets I already fabricated from styrene, I posted pictures of that way back when.
–Randy