The other evening I spent a few minutes filing down my cut underframe for one of these baggage cars. I glued and spliced it together, and wanted to test its fit in the body. Therein began the problem.
Of course the curved bits of the skirting make the bottom of the car a bit narrower, and I wasn’t able to get the underframe in past them. And the laminated sides are actually fairly rigid where they’re glued together and to the ends, so while trying to figure out a way to slip it in there, this happened:
The damage is certainly minor; it just split the brittle CA joint between the side and the end, but it illustrates a bit of a flaw in my assembly sequence.
It’s relatively easily surmountable; I just need to file the backs of the curved skirting down to flatten the back side so that the underframe slides in past them. It’ll make me look at my plan for subsquent cars based on these sides and core kits – either I need to file the backs of the skirts on all these cars, or I really need to make the roof, rather than the floor, the removeable part. If I want to model dropped steps on some of the coaches I have on deck, I may have to do that anyway.
This car’s body and roof have already been glued together as a unit, so it will be repaired and have the backs of the end skirts filed to fit the floor. I’ll revisit this again with the next car.
Urgh, shame it broke apart like that. It’s better that you tried to test-fit the floor before you got too far along with the project. I had many minor setbacks with my SW1200RS project, and a couple that had the potential to put the entire project in peril. It’s all part of the process of learning.
You probably already know this, but I’ll offer up this tip anyway just in case you or your readers might benefit from it. CA doesn’t bond to itself, so in order to properly glue that end back on, you might want to get all of the old CA out of the joint. You can do that by taking the whole end right off and sanding the CA out of the joint, or by using CA de-bonder. I prefer the latter method. I put a small amount of de-bonder on the end of a scalpel and drip it onto the dried CA. In a few seconds it turns dried CA into a clear snot-like goober.
HH
Yeah, I’ll need to pick up some de-bonder somewhere.
It’s not catastrophic damage fortunately, it just broke the CA bond between the pieces. Once the old CA is removed it should take ten seconds to glue back together with no sign it ever broke.
I’m building one of these cars too. Was this ever finished? Reason I’m asking is I can’t find the vents for the roof anywhere that look like the ones on these cars and wanted to know what you ended up doing if you ever made it that far. TIA.