i have 5 DC 50 foot passenger car kits i want to add scale chains to the end railings on each car. A-line sells scale chain in 12" lengths. What number of links of chain do i use? They have chain with links going from 7 links and upward to about 27 or so links for each 12" of chain.
Those numbers are Links per inch. I would go with around 20 or so and you will be fine.
David B
Yes, those are “per inch” measurements, so I’d go with the 27/inch chain–or even finer, if you can find some. In O scale, the scale I currently work in, 32 links per inch chain has links a shade more than 1-1/2" long, pretty hefty for a railing safety chain, and since HO is 67% the size of O, figure from there! That being said, however, some things have to be a compromise in most modeling scales: HO grab irons should be .010"–or less!–but would be difficult to work with and quite fragile, to boot. I’d say go with the 27/inch–and keep your little passenger’s and trainmen’s hands away from them!
If you want to experiment, Jack Work used a technique for faking very fine chain, back in his '50s Model Railroader articles: take a length of fine copper wire and put it in the serrated jaws of needle-nosed pliers and crimp it. I did this on quite a few models when I was modeling HO old-time cars and it looks startlingly good! You’ll have to experiment with wire size and the amount of pressure in the crimping, but the effect is worth it. What’s more, this “chain” can be secured across the railing’s gap with CA without the fussiness of doing it with real chain, which has the habit of wicking the liquid cement into its little holes and gaps.
I seem to recall someone suggesting Kalmbach bringing out books of others of their authors’ MR articles, and I think Jack Works’ works would be a good candidate. The only real flub he made was when he sliced doughnuts of house wire insulation and glued them in the gable trim on one of his depots: it looked vaguely like barnacles. (Another wasn’t his fault: he was forced by circumstances to use the old Mantua loop couplers, which worked wonderfully but didn’t resemble the real thing any more
Even the Builders in Scale chain at 40 links per inch is too heavy. At 40 links per real inch, that scales out to links about 2" long in HO. While the chain may not look too bad, the wire will look more realistic.
Wayne
Jack Work invented that? [:O] Just shows, great minds think alike - I thought I was the first, just a few weeks ago! [:D] I used a single strand of 18-guage zipcord wire and the jaws of a hemostat to make the chain for a Tichy water column I put together. I couldn’t find anything finer than about 40 links/inch (2" links, in HO!), and came up with this idea - it works really well! Particularly since the normal viewing distance for our models is around 200 scale feet or so, and fine chain can’t be told from rope at that distance. The only problem I found with it is that the crimping makes the wire somewhat brittle - you have to handle it very carefully, or it breaks.