I am typing this from an almost horizontal position. I was supposed to be arriving at Naperville today, but my balky back made other plans. So, I type this from home. It's been a couple months or so since I started things back up in earnest, including casting. As the "RPM season" sets in, I thought it a good time to share a little bit about what's coming over the next few months.
Parts sets have proven to be a good way to dip my toes in the casting pool. I mostly learned a few things about what shape of mold works best for me and how I like a few varieties of silicone. I am adding a couple wrinkles to the existing offerings. First, for the ATSF Bx-34 parts I have added the 1959-1970s scheme, illustrated in the photo at the top of the page. In addition, I have added Shadow Keystone decals covering 1950s+ schemes for the PRR X32A parts.
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| This and the following three photos are of the R-40-25 parts |
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| R-40-26 underframe floor casting... board-by-board! |
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| Illinois Terminal AC&F Carbuilder's end for 1937 AAR box car (pre-production before changes) |
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| Photo illustrating the extremely subtle ripples in the side sheathing of the PRR X43A |
I am also charging ahead with some full kit offerings. The first is the Milwaukee 50' single sheathed auto cars that I teased awhile back. It will be released November 1st via the Speedwitch site (all decals, etchings, trucks, and other parts are already in house so they will ship immediately!) Another project is the Pullman-Standard-built Central of Georgia 10'0" inside height Emergency box car (PS if you have National Scale Car's set for the A&WP/WofA/Georgia, those decals will work on this model, as well.) If the CofGa offering proves popular, I will add Birmingham Southern, as well. I also have three PRR cars in the hopper: the G28, X43A and X45. The G28 is a project that I started years back. It will be a showstopper, with full underframe detail... and the underframe was a unique welded design with very interesting crossmembers so it bears full attention! The X43A was a 40', mostly postwar AAR design car, with welded sides. I have created patterns with extremely subtle waviness to the sides that I am extremely pleased with and they were unusual in the PRR universe in that they were delivered with black roofs. The last of these three is the X45, a proprietary PRR design for a 50' welded box car. I again added waviness to the sides and the Pennsy proprietary details, including the underframe, are really cool.
The last of the full kits, but by no means least, and listed in its own paragraph, is a Western Pacific flat car built by AC&F in 1942 that is a fully 3D printed offering. It is spectacular. More details to follow on this gem...
A final tease... several years back I presented a clinic including details about scratchbuilding board-by-board patterns for single sheathed cars. I have been fruitlessly looking for those patterns for over a year. I thought they were lost in the past year's move. Well, a few weeks back, they were presented to me. Turns out I had sent them to someone along with a bunch of other stuff and they were returned! Here is the end for the car in question. IYKYK
Now that Yarmouth has closed up, I could use some 10-6 NSC-3 ends! Heard that Pierre had sold his parts line, but haven’t heard who got them.
ReplyDeleteHooray for the G28! I spent a long time adding Archer rivets and plastic bits to the two that I have built, and carved up some parts for the brake bits on the ends. Those rivets disappeared in paint and primer, and I’m bummed every time I look at them.
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