I am one who uses simple things to supplement what I can’t get or don’t want to pay expensive prices for. An example for extra weight, I glue pennies to floors of some old IHC passenger cars. HEY, I’ve added .80 cents to the value of my train LOL[:p]. Sometimes I’ll use sinkers from a bait shop. Pennies and sinkers can be used for weight in freight cars too. I have used scotch tape to resemble “fogged up” windows in buildings for winter settings.
Does anyone else “pinch pennies” or find a way to compensate to get around modeling obstacles? One would be surprised what can be done with simple ordinary things.
I always make my interior details with a few leftover parts and cardboard… lots of cardboard. Some streelights on my layout are made out of plastic lollypop sticks and a plastic pearl with a LED inside.
I pince all my hobby pennies and streatch my hobby dollars. While I am alway on the look out for the best bargain. I never pay list price for anything (Unless it means I wont get what I want). I also serach for alternate sources for raw materials. E-Bay is my friend. My best purchase was an MRC F-7 and twp Bachmann Plus SD45s for $75.00.
I could go on. But ya, Im in with the penny pinching club.
One penny-pinching technique I utilized was picking up cheap palm trees from a party-supply store–they don’t look all that great by themselves, but by sanding and painting the trunks and painting the leaves they’re not too bad, and at eight cents apiece they’re a lot cheaper than $12-15 for HO scale palm trees from a hobby shop. The city I model has a lot of palm trees, so they’re not something I wanted to leave out.
I invariably search the “bargain bins” at hobbyshops for usable items and tend to look at whatever widgets I stumble across with a modeler’s eye. Cheapskateness and creativity go hand in hand, and can help stretch the modeling budget for those items that can’t be found on sale…
I was thinking if I needed to increase the ballast in a car, I would replace the metal weight with a 1/8" chunk of flatbar. or even add the flatbar to the car
In a pinch, I think Lead might be the better choise.[;)]
I think that the pennies are cheaper than weights that you would purchase.
I once knew a guy who was finishing his basement. He was putting up furing strips with a powder actuated nailer. But the powder shot was too strong and splintered the wood. They sold special slugs to slow the nails down for 2 cents each. But he concluded that the pennies worked just as well at half the price!!
I save everything for reuse. For instance, when I build freight cars, I don’t superdetail the underside of every car - don’t turn me in! I save the leftovers - they make great junk around an engine servicing facility.
I do my own ammo reloading and bullet casting which gave me this idea. In the past I’ve melted down automotive wheel weights and poured the melted lead onto an old cookie sheet making thin “sheets” of lead, about 1/16" thick. Some tire shops will give you a couple handfuls or so of used wheel weights at no cost. I then cut pieces of this “sheet of lead” to the size/weight that I need and glue it using contact cement.
It takes some of your time to make the lead sheet but if you find a tire shop that will give you a couple hands full of used weights, the cost is zero.
Don’t use the pan (used for melting) nor the cookie sheet, for household baking once you’ve poured lead into it!!
I use those styrofoam take home boxes (“doggy bags”) from restaurants for structure walls, roofs and a whole alota other things that requires a flat surface. Much cheaper than buying styrene. Some take home boxes are clear plastic which makes good window glass.
.it is reassuring to know that there are so many of us with so much creativeness. i apply this talent to almost everything in my life and have much to show for it. this helps a lot when you are not interested in pursuing the dollar for the sake of monetary gain. i have built a workshop, music room, train room, two woodstorage rooms, motorcycle storage room,------- and so on. most of this is from discarded items.
My method doesn’t work with passenger cars but on freight cars I just fill them with plaster. Any spill wipes off. I use this on any enclosed cars including covered hoppers, open hoppers I out a load over, boxcars and tank cars.
I usually replace missing/lost/damaged parts with something fabricated from brass wire and/or sheet. For example, when fitting the detailing parts to my new Bachmann Class 37 (a British diesel loco, the Bachmann model is excellent - runs quieter than my Proto 1000 models), I suffered the familiar problem of seeing a lamp iron go “ping” from my tweezers and disappear forever. Solution? A bit of brass wire, bent to shape and filed to the correct profile!
So how cheap am I?
The charcoal in the kids fishtank filter never gets thrown as it will either be used as coal loads or ballast.
I follow technicians that are working on the ship’s electronics, if the wire goes in the trash I’ll salvage it. Dead plants in the garden get dried and are turned into trees. This works for Sedum and Astilbe. Stems from Forsythia bushes get turned ibto HO scale logs.
Extra pieces of track are used as third rails to keep the train from jumping the track.
Old Dry wall sheets and Bark Mulch nuggets come in a 20 pound bag are turned into sedimentry rock formations. And I’m still looking for ways to use up the junk I have amassed over the past 10 years. I am Packus Ratus Maximus.
Fergus is right on with the trees from sedum. My wife gardens quite a bit and she has a big batch of sedum out there. Harvest it late in the fall (November for us this year) and it will come back next year on it’s own. Meanwhile I have substantial number of tree armatures in the basement drying. Knock off the remainder of the blossoms, apply some poly fiber fill, spray adhesive and ground foam and you have a pretty good tree for virtually no money. I found a dozen or so cans of spray adhesive for 99 cents a can at a freight salvage place (Cargo Largo if you live in Eastern Jackson County!). That was months ago and I’m still on the first spray can.
I went to a plumbing contractor who gave me some used 1/8" lead sheet. In HO approx. 1x1 = 1 oz. I cut it up to the weight’s req’d. Lead is toxic so be careful.
I’ve been using the pennies for weight thing for many years. I would always throw my pennies into a container anyway, so I had a bunch to begin with. Then years ago I read where using them for weight is actually cheaper per car than spending the money to buy actual weights! Been using them ever since gluing them together and into the cars with mainly Walthers GOO. I’ve got a peanut can full of pennies some place for use when I get back to kit building. For open type cars you’ll have to get more creative, though!
A creative thought just came to mind for using pennies in open type cars. Try to “camoflauge” ( I think that’s spelled right ) the pennies by glueing pieces of the same load on them. An example, for scrap loads, you can glue a piece of scrap on the pennies to blend them in.
The process might not work on all open loads. I think something else other than pennies will have to be used for additional weight on completely empty open type cars.