Wednesday, 5 February 2014

Carriages Completed

After many months of steady work I finally have a trio of completed resin Super Barns sitting on the workbench.


They won't be sitting here for very long, in fact, because they will be dispatched to their new owner who is going to finish them off with a paint job.


Building my first production run of resin carriages has been a very interesting experience and I've learned a lot.

It's certainly much faster than scratch building to produce the parts for multiple carriages, however cleaning out the flash from each window can be a bit of a chore, especially with the FR toplight design.

On the minus side you do have to be very careful to glue the parts together accurately. It's much harder to bond resin parts together than the equivalent bits in styrene - even when using slow set super glue which allows you some adjustment time.

That said, the carriages are a lot more robust and stand up a lot better to being handled and abused when fitting all the bits and pieces. They do not warp or bend so much as laminated styrene.

However, the glued components will break apart if they are subject to a shock such as being dropped on the floor. Yes, I've found that out the hard way a couple of times!

I can see me making quite a few more resin carriages in the years ahead.


3 comments:

  1. This might be a very dumb question...but can you tell me how you attach your bogie trucks to the carriage body? I'm looking to build some US gondola cars and it's really confusing me!

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  2. Just small brass nuts and bolts, Christian. 10BA size. The bolt is fixed in a hole drilled in the floor and the nut secures the bogie (truck) from beneath. A dab of glue on the nut will keep it in place.

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  3. Cheers Rob! That reminds me of the old Parkside Dundas coaches that had a similar setup.

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