On30 18ft. Boxcar

If you've followed my blog for any amount of time you know I like distractions.  Truth be told the majority of my model railroad time lately has been doing things like building benchwork, sanding, painting, etc.  I'm starting to feel like less of a modeler and more of a general contractor.

It was time for a break from benchwork to do some actual modelling.  Over on Railroad-line.com forum, a gentleman by the name of Richard Gardner started a thread in which he posted his email and offered (for free) plans he had drawn of an On30 18 ft. narrow gauge boxcar.  He also hinted at an interest in doing a "build along" where community members built the car along with him.

His plans looked very well done and he has since added seven addendums which give templates and measurements for almost every facet of the car's construction.  In short, the plans he's giving away for free are better than many kits I've seen.  Sure you have to do a little leg work to buy all the parts, but the experience of doing it yourself and the thrill of scratchbuilding are hard to match.

In any case I made my way down to Caboose and picked up a few supplies.  The car is being built in wood and includes plans for both inside braced and outside braced (framed).  To start I plan to build the inside braced one.  If all goes well the outside braced one will be next.

One technique he started with (which I've copied) is the use of custom-built jigs in styrene.  These would likely be overkill if one was only building a single of a car, however one facet of scratchbuilding I had always wondered about was maintaining consistency.  Jigs seem to go quite a distance in helping with this.

Also, in the case of the roof framing (pictures below) I'm not sure assembly would be anywhere near reasonable without a jig.

I had actually started out playing with the idea of building the boxcar up-scaled in 1:35n2.  I even created a matteboard version of it to get a sense of the size in three dimensions (ignore that poor excuse for a 1:35 engine, it was all I had handy at the time of photo)...

That certainly would have been possible, but it would have added a lot of extra work, used about 30% more materials, and generally made things harder on myself in terms of detail parts.

So staying with On30, I began by building the jig for the chassis.  I kept the left side of the jig open so that it can be used to make chassis of any length (likely 18', 20', 22', or 24').

I was going to get started on the chassis when I realized I had accidentally bought the wrong size wood and I didn't have the size to actually make the chassis with.  Guess I'm dropping by Hobby Lobby this week...

So I moved on to building the jig for the roof framing.  The roof framing looks like one of the more tedious, delicate, and intricate builds of the boxcar and I think it is.  The jig consists of stands for the roof rafters which are hand cut from 1/32 basswood.

Once all the rafters are cut they can be loaded into the jig and the perpendicular bracing gets added...

Tada!  So here's where it stands at the moment. The framing on the roof is done.  You can see what I mean earlier when I said that building this without the jig would have been quite a bit more difficult.

I plan to pickup the missing 3/32" x 5/32" wood for the frame sometime this week and get the ball rolling on that.  Once the frame is done it's onto the 4 walls (though I'll probably take a side route and make sure the couplers/bolsters/trucks are in working order before putting everything together).