Building a center-balcony carriage - part IV

It has been a while since the previous post (part III) on this project. So, time for an update.

Painting 

 

I tried several shades of green and decided that I painted the carriage with Tamiya XF-5 Flat Green.The Tamiya paint has a lot of pigment and gives a good coverage. It dries nice and clean but you should not 'play' too much with the paint, as you can do with enamel paint. Because the paint dries very fast you can damage the top layer if you go over it with the brush shortly (not directly) after applying. So just apply the paint and leave alone. The roof and chassis were painted with a layer of normal ' household'  acrylic paint from a discount store. In this case it was RAL 8022 which is a brownish black color. Though it looks good on the roof I was not totally sure of it with the chassis. I later repainted the chassis with Tamiya XF 69 NATO Black after placing the rivets (see below).

 

Trying different shades of green.

 

Roof painted with DIY acrylic paint RAL 8022 brown/black

 

The paint was applied with a flat brush for the surfaces and a little brush for spots the big brush could not reach

Rivets

For the simulation of rivets I used little plastic "diamond" half round beads stickers from a discount store. It's the kind of stuff creative mom's and girls use to make all kinds of bling-bling creations. The beads are about 2 mm in diameter and have a self-adhesive layer on the flat side. Although they are called 'diamonds' the beads are just half round balls, so, no ' diamond' surface. The beads are perfect for rivets and much more cheaper (1080 pieces for only 1,50 euro) than the ones you can buy in the model train hobby stores.

Cheap rivets; 1080 pieces for 1,50 euro!

Apply the self adhesive half round beads with a pincet

Painted with Tamiya XF 69 NATO Black

-o-

Building a center-balcony carriage - part III

For the roof I first took a 2 mm balsa sheet as base. Grooves were scribed in to make the sheet bend easier and prevent the sheet to break while bending it in shape over the carriage top.
Because the sheet was only 10 cm wide I had to ad an extra strip of 1 cm to make the bend sheet cover the width of the roof of the carriage. This strip was connected to the sheet using tape at the under side of the sheet. This roof base was not glued to the carriage, only held in place by tape.

At this side you can notice the extra strip

When the base was in the right position and firmly held in place by the tape, a 5 cm wide strip of 1 mm thick balsa sheet was  glued over the base. Contact glue was applied on both the base sheet and the top sheet and than those two pieces were firmly pressed together.
Notice that the tape on the base sheet was left in place and the thinner balsa top sheet was glued over it. This way the base could stay in place. The tape between the sheets is not that thick and will not be noticeable later.

The same was done at the other side, leaving a 1 cm wide opening at the top of the roof, which was filled up with a balsa strip:

Another 1 mm sheet was glued on top of this.The only difference is that I did not left an open space on top of the roof but at one side. This is easier to fill up neatly and it will give more strength to the roof:

Finally it is left to dry for  24 hour.

Hopefully this glued sandwich of 3 balsa sheets (now 4 mm thick in total) will stay in form when the tape is removed. We will see...

UPDATE 16-10-2019:
Yes it worked! After the glue had dried completely I removed the tape and the roof stayed perfectly in shape. Next step will be placing some spacers / supports to keep the roof in the right place.  I draw some lines following the inside walls with a pen through the window openings...) as markers for these.

 

Back to part II

-o-

Building a center-balcony carriage - part II

An update on this carriage (see part 1 here):

Today I widened the balcony from 4 to 5 cm. This looks better and the little passengers have more room on the balcony while entering or leaving the train (sorry, no picture of this...).
All sidings are basically finished and the two compartments were glued in place on the chassis.

From the same Playmobil carriage the trucks came from I removed the buffers from the chassis by using a little hacksaw:

The cut out piece was then neatly filed:

A bufferbar was made in the same way as the sidings: a piece of balsa covered with polystyrene sheet. Two holes were drilled in the hollow part of the buffer (don't know the correct term... buffer support?); one on the back side and one on top. The hole in the backside can be used for a screw that holds the buffer in place (I will glue it but the screw is extra).

 The second hole is on top to hold a little brass hook for the chain:

 

The bufferbar is made to slide in a groove between the chassis and the top side siding. This way the bar is not only very sturdy but it give me the possibility to adjust the bar somewhat in height to align it more easily with the buffer height of the LGB carriage. 

Once in good position the bar is glued in place. 

The bar in place. You can see I made some extra re-enforcement with balsa.

 

Alignment with LGB buffer: 

And today's end result (without the hook...):

Back to part I

On to part III

-o-

Building a center-balcony carriage - part I

The three-point-suspension experiment formed a nice base to begin with for scratch-building a new carriage for my railway. The idea is a freestyle center balcony carriage as I liked the bit different design.

As I did not had any detailed drawings of such a carriage the build itself is trail and error, seeing what looks right or not. I used sketches and pictures of similar carriages to form an idea. An LGB carriage was used a bit as guideline and comparison (for instance the width and height of the coach, the coach bottom height, coupler height etc.) so it would fit in nicely with the existing stock.

Initially I tried to build the coach from only balsa but this was not a success. The 2mm balsa was too weak and brittle and although it can be cut very easily I did not manage to cut out very exact parts.  The solution isfound on using thin polystyrene sheets (I believe 0,5 mm) combined with the balsa. First I draw the parts on the polystyrene sheet and cut it to size. Than gluing the sheet on the balsa with contact glue (Bison Transparent) and cut the balsa following the outlining of the polystyrene parts.
Planking was scraped in the polystyrene using an old but sharp little electronica screwdriver. Of course you can also glue strips of polystyrene or use special siding sheets from for instance Evergreen.

Comparison with LGB carriage

This is the result so far. Hopefully an update soon.

On to part II

-o-