Another bloody grey sgnss - this time with a 45 footer - 3 - Finito.

I forgot to post these yesterday after brushing the dust off the big camera. Makes a change from using my 7 year old cellphone's blurry camera.

Another bloody grey sgnss - this time with a 45 footer - 2

Following on from last time,  You may remember that I planned to make one of these and got part way through the wagon chassis:

Since I can't find any Z scale 45 foot containers, some time back I photoshopped a few images together. Some of mine,  but most stolen off the web, fiddled with and perspective corrected. It was printed off on fairly good quality paper by a local print shop.

So, cutting out an ECS one:

And making up a box to go underneath:

While I scaled my clever print of plans perfectly for length in photoshop, they are about a mm thin in width across the wagon, so I painted any bits of my white box that might show out from underneath! I'm usually quite good at mixing paints to colour match things, but just couldn't get this purply shade right and kept coming back to various browns... Close enough. I also edged my cutouts in this paint - where my knife cuts exposed white paper edges:

You might also see above, while the brown paint was setting, that I applied a white .010 x .020 plastic strip along the bottom of the wagon chassis and some .020 x .020 x approx .020 cubes as twistlocks with previous wagons. I probably did a neater job on this one than any of my previous wagons.

Container cutouts here going onto the white box, and the two holes in the chassis bogie bolsters covered with paper:

As with the previous wagons, air tanks and some underframe detail was added, but this time an added detail was a brake cylinder and various actuating bits borrowed from one of those dump cars cut up for building previous container wagons:

Some grey paint and the wagon itself now nearing completion. Dark grey paint was used to edge the cutouts on the metal end platforms to make the deck look thinner for some reason. It has had end steps, data boards and tiedown hooks added from the red curtain topped wagon that donated the chassis. Yellow was daubed on twistlocks and the tiedown-protection-bars, and some thinned down brown was washed on as weathering:

Perhaps tomorrow the container - with glue setting in the background - will be affixed. I may need to trim down the height of one or two of my twistlocks to enable it to snuggle down over the side sills as planned.

You might also see in the model pic how much thinner the filed-down end platform side sills look compared to the taller centre section (black) of the full-height Marklin casting. This section should be hidden by the container by this time tomorrow.

Comparing this with the prototype pic, it's not strictly accurate, but gives a fair impression I reckon - and in my defence, there seem to be a million varietals of these 60 foot container flats. Most importantly, rather than riding tall like a lot of Marklin Z scale offerings, this looks more hunkered down over the bogies because of that plastic strip, which also adds visually to the thinning of the sill too. 

Another bloody grey sgnss - this time with a 45 footer - 1

Well, what else can you do during the Covid-crisis?

Yet another Marklin bogie chassis has been freed up, so this time, for something slightly different, the target is something like:

 Stolen from the web but copied here in case that website goes away ...

As the ends of the wagon will be exposed this time (not covered by a full load of containers as most of mine are) I thought I'd "show off some frame member detail".  Firstly the wagon was thinned down with a file as per previous wagons. Then a small drill was deployed to make a lot of holes:

These random holes were then joined up using the drill and smoothed out with small files. I have a set of 5 'jewellers files' files in different shapes purchased about 20 years ago, and although I don't use them very often, they seem as good and sharp as the day they were born:

As with the last few wagons made from these chunky Marklin chassis, I will hang the sides of the container down over the wagon chassis sides a smidge, to make the container sit closer to the rails and make the wagon side sills seem thinner. Alas as the container will only hide the middle, so I took some metal off the top of the visible end platforms. Somehow the whole casting didn't snap or crack: 

Bare metal bits primed for an overnight setting: