Sn3 Boxcar Build (Part 7)

After getting things back on track with the floor, the rest of the work left on the car is mostly detailing and getting it track-worthy.  I started off with the side details, the door guides and stops.

Then the corner braces.  Despite this being a D&RGW kit, I'm building it as if it were more of a "generic" narrow gauge boxcar.  By that I mean, something which could pass for a car that ran on the Nevada County Narrow Gauge, or the Souther Pacific Narrow Gauge, or the like.  The intermediate corner braces had an interesting design where a small part of the corner brace stuck out beyond the car (a scale 4").  They were also varying heights on the ladder and non-ladder side of the car.  To me this look at a bit too D&RGW-specific, so I consulted a few books and decided to not follow the plans and to go with what I saw to be more typical, which was having the intermediate corner braces at the same height above the 3rd rung on the ladder.

I just noticed as I was looking at this photo that I missed the door stop for the "B" end of the car.  I will need to add that in when I sit down next.

One thing that makes this a bit more sane is that this kit includes a silhouette of the parts and their letter.  This makes it far and away easier to identify and install parts.  I'm sure for a seasoned kit builder the name of the part is enough but for people like me who haven't memorized the name of every part on every narrow gauge car just yet, it's a huge help.

Next up was the roof which started by installing the long walk down the center of the roof.

I'll pause here to mention that the side roof walks are ridiculous.  And the recommended installation method was ridiculous too.  See the 3 small tabs on the far end of the walk (pictured below)?  Those get glued under the bottom of the long roof walk.  The "legs" as it were are supposed to bend down.  Mine didn't have any fold lines, and despite me scribing in a line prior to folding them they snapped, almost breaking.  Instead of installing them straight away I put CA on the joints and set them aside to dry.

Since I wasn't going to attempt to finish the roof until those were dry, I flipped the car over to start detailing the underside.  First up was the needle beams and holy parting lines batman!  PBL typically does a phenomenal job on minimizing parting lines and flashing, but wow these were a bit off.

My process for cleaning up parting lines is primarily to use the back of a #11 blade as a sort of line scraper, and keep working it over a parting line until it's mostly gone.  The needle beams were a tad too wide, but a small bit of filing made them a perfect fit.

With the needle beams cleaned up, I started installing the undercar detail.  This copy happens to be one of the newer revisions of this kit which includes the new 3D underbody diagram.  This is such a help in putting all this together.

If it weren't for that graphic I would have been lost.  Why?  Because the parts have changed since the instructions were written.  So I did my best to follow them but for the most part just built things off the 3D graphic.

Now I could go and talk about how I installed each part, but that would be boring (honestly the undercar is one of the most boring parts to me anyways), so I'll round it out by saying "I installed the details under the car body".

One thing that has always baffled me is why manufacturers like to use fishing line or nylon rod to represent the turnbuckles.  This isn't just PBL, it's every boxcar kit I think I've ever built.  For the life of me, keeping a piece of string taut while CA sets iss one of the most frustrating things.  Six or 8 months ago I decided I had had enough and bought myself a supply of thin gauge music wire.  It's so much easier to simply bend and slide these in place.  Here's the first one, bent according to the diagram.

Maybe other people like the fishing line approach, but I feel the wire makes doing the turnbuckles fun again and I'm willing to pay an extra 50 cents per model to avoid the stress of the fishing line approach.

The nice thing about doing it this way is I don't need to glue them in until I'm really ready too, which is a help for adding more under body details.  In the picture below they are all installed but nothing is glued.  It's so much nicer (and easier to keep things out of the way of wheels if I need to make an adjustment prior to gluing).

More work and more parts later and the underbody is pretty much done.  I flipped the car back over to handle those side roof walks.  I found toothpicks could be used to hold them under the long roof walk while the styrene cement dried.  If I was to do this again (and I do have more than one copy of this kit so that will be the case), I think I would use a thin piece of styrene under the rear 3 tabs that was the perfect height to sandwich it between the roof and the walk.

Well despite my distaste for the roof walks the cement dried and I realized I did actually accomplish the installation of them.

Time to test the car before I commit to the final details.  It's not done yet, but the instructions recommend actually putting it on track at this point to make sure it's operational before the details and paint.

You might recall I damaged the trucks.  I happened to have a set of RTR trucks of the same style which I set the car on for testing.  For whatever frustration I might have had with the weights, underbody detail, or side roof walks, I forgot it all when I saw it rolling around on the track.  My little Sn3 fleet is coming alive.  How cool is this.

(As a bit of a joke I setup a HOn3 car in the distance for a "foreshortening" effect for this photo.  I was surprised when I saw the photo that it's actually quite effective.)

My son stopped by to congratulate me on how the boxcar was coming along.  No, really he came along to ask why the K-27 -- his favorite train -- wasn't running.  A chip off the old block I tell ya.  As an aside, the distance the HOn3 track is from the front of that shelf is no mistake.  It happens to be the exact length of a toddler's arm.