Here are some pictures of my scratchbuilt HOn3 D&RGW 3000 series boxcar:
It is fiddly with the small struts that holds the walkway…
The doors with fittings and brackets .
The ladders are made of jig-bent nickel silver wires with Grandt Line nut-bolt-washers .
Painted!
Properly cleaned, primed with plastic prep for improved adhesion on plastic and then painted with Polly Scale D&RGW freight car red. The sides and ends are clear coated with Future Kleer to prepare it for the decals.
The original:
Now it’s just the couplers left to add and the decals and some light weathering. It was a good test run before the construction of the rest of them. I intend to build 10 of them in the first round. Next build will be in mixed media with a wood body/chassie and brass/plastic parts.
Great piece of work! I would hate to have to build all of my box cars this way, however I do plan a couple of special, maybe kit bashed, boxes of my own to create a custom car or two. Your effort is very inspiring.
I am curious about how you ‘cleaned’ your very nice box car. I have a scratch built rail truck which has the same problem as your freight car did before cleaning. The styrene sides are covered with bits of I don’t know what, but they obviously have to be removed before painting. They won’t come off with just a simple brushing. In fact, they seem to be rather well attached. This may be a stupid question, but how did you clean the stuff off?
I used a soap flakes, the type used in dish washers. I washed it with a flat artist brush. The small spots you see in the pics are removed with a glass fibre brush, which has the advantage of making the area dull.
Unfortunately I have applied some rivet decals to the body. If they don’t survive the washing process I will just have to chalk that up to learning the hard way and do them over again.
You probably can’t get TSP in Canada any more, just as we can’t. We do have a TSP-substitute that works pretty well. That’s what I use when I have the need for doing this sort of cleanup before finishing. If the TSP-substitute is available in Canada, it’s worth a try.
The original:
