What non-auto model did you get today?

[Earl Marischal]

10 hours ago, Ace-Garageguy said:

Another HO train score, a decent size box of structure kits, freight car kits, some scenery material, and a couple of nicely weathered built-up freight cars with metal wheels, sprung trucks, and Kadees.

Just the NIB Bar Mills Staton Marine kit and the 3-fer Accurail gondola kit would have set me back considerably more on feePay than I paid for the whole mess.

Looking forward to a pleasant evening of opening all the boxes and looking at the contents. 

       

      

 

Bill,

Trying to contact you about a PIF.

steve

[Ace-Garageguy]

36 minutes ago, Earl Marischal said:

Bill,

Trying to contact you about a PIF.

steve

I cleared some message space.

[Ace-Garageguy]

Lot of 8 Proto 2000 freight car kits for less than $8 each including shipping, which is a deal.

These are quite nice, highly detailed kits that usually run at least $20. They have separate (and very fragile) ladders, grabs, steps, and other detail parts, aimed at adult modelers. The similar cars have different road numbers too, so that won't have to be dealt with later on.

Alas, a couple have been partially started, but the work is mostly OK and what's not can be camouflaged with weathering.

The five drop-end mill gondolas are appropriate for a steel mill setting.

The double-door boxcars can load either complete automobiles or, more commonly, stamped metal parts for automobile construction, so they're appropriate for a sheetmetal parts-factory setting, which could be close to a steel mill.

No real need for the stock car, as feedlots, meat packing plants, or cattle loading pens don't figure into my plans, but you never know.

   

     

 

Edited September 16 by Ace-Garageguy
punctiliousness

[Ace-Garageguy]

About 50 random packets of HO-scale detail parts, couplers, and mechanical and electrical bits, multiples of some.

Detail parts include diesel cab furnishings, air and MU hoses and stands, diesel railing upgrades, boxcar ends and doors, diesel winterization hatches, fan and radiator grilles, lights, horns, etc.

Mechanical bits are mostly gearsets for more realistic speeds of diesel locomotives.

Electrical stuff includes circuits for flashing strobes and EOT devices, and motor brushes.

Average cost about $2 each. 

   

[mk11]

Finally getting into some stuff I had in storage after dad passed away. I saved what I could of his hobby stuff, trains and such, before his wife cleared it out  

This old steamer, tender and some cars surfaced this week. Not sure which manufacturer but it's a brass 4-4-2 in what looks like O gauge. Any one know about this one?

[Ace-Garageguy]

More "antique mall" scores, including a NOS HO McKeen double 45-foot trailer kit in Burlington Northern colors, usually between $25 and $35 online & delivered, for $4. These are too long for the period I'll be modeling, but the chassis and wheels will work just fine under older, shorter shells fabbed from styrene stock.

And several NOS HO Athearn 34-foot open top hopper kits in random liveries and no repeating road numbers, for $5 each. These go for anywhere from $17 to about $30 online, delivered. I'll need a lot of coal hoppers to service the Hulett unloaders and the steel mill coke and municipal power plants, and I usually buy cheapo or broken RTRs that need weathering or parts like wheels, trucks, and Kadees to make them presentable...often for just a buck or two each...but when these nicely detailed kits come up cheap, it's hard to resist them for foreground placement.

        

My planned layout (a dream at this point, because I have no room now or in the foreseeable future EDIT: though I think I'll at least be able to build a module or two) is intended to celebrate the peak of America's heavy industrial period.

Photo below shows hoppers lined up waiting for loading under massive Huletts.

 

Edited September 29 by Ace-Garageguy
punctiliousness

[Beans]

Wife picked this up at the bookstore.  It is now our project.  Mostly friction fit parts with some fiddly bits I have had to repair but overall a fun little kit so far.  

[Big John]

One for you train buffs...

[Ace-Garageguy]

Nice and cool this AM but I was creaky, moving slow, so instead of going straight to the shop, I slid by the little church car show held every first Saturday just a couple miles away. When that wrapped up, since I was in the neighborhood of one of the 'antique malls' where I sometimes find HO train stuff...

Jackpot. 32 NOS/NIB blue-box-Athearn, Accurail, and Branchline Blueprint Series freight car kits, some with high-end sprung, metal-wheel trucks and Kadees already in the boxes. Also got an old Athearn powered SDP40 in Santa Fe blue-yellow freight livery, damaged and "worked on" by some ham-handed chimp but restorable and also sporting Kadees, plus four Heljan, Con-Cor and AHM structure kits.

$5 each.  

Sad little loco, below. Box was marked in pen SD30, but it's actually an SDP40. Broken motor mount and driveshafts, buggered wiring, and a few loose handrails "reattached" to the body shell with a soldering iron...but the dual-flywheel motor runs fine, the trucks are OK, and I have the parts. Repairing everything else is pretty easy, and it needs a paint job. These were built for passenger service so wouldn't have been in freight colors (the longer squared tail houses a steam-generator for passenger car heating), and AFAIK SF never owned any anyway.

One of the structure kits, below.

The Branchline Blueprint Series kits are particularly nice, US-made, with separate ladders, grabs, doors, etc., and separate ends and roofs with nothing molded on that can be used as masters to cast more for upgrading el cheapo rolling stock.

        

 

[Earl Marischal]

11 minutes ago, Ace-Garageguy said:

Nice and cool this AM but I was creaky, moving slow, so instead of going straight to the shop, I slid by the little church car show held every first Saturday just a couple miles away. When that wrapped up, since I was in the neighborhood of one of the 'antique malls' where I sometimes find HO train stuff...

Jackpot. 32 NOS/NIB blue-box-Athearn, Accurail, and Branchline Blueprint Series freight car kits, some with high-end sprung, metal-wheel trucks and Kadees already in the boxes. Also got an old Athearn powered SDP40 in Santa Fe blue-yellow freight livery, damaged and "worked on" by some ham-handed chimp but restorable and also sporting Kadees, plus four Heljan, Con-Cor and AHM structure kits.

$5 each.  

Sad little loco, below. Box was marked in pen SD30, but it's actually an SDP40. Broken motor mount and driveshafts, buggered wiring, and a few loose handrails "reattached" to the body shell with a soldering iron...but the dual-flywheel motor runs fine, the trucks are OK, and I have the parts. Repairing everything else is pretty easy, and it needs a paint job. These were built for passenger service so wouldn't have been in freight colors (the longer squared tail houses a steam-generator for passenger car heating), and AFAIK SF never owned any anyway.

 

One of the structure kits, below.

 

The Branchline Blueprint Series kits are particularly nice, US-made, with separate ladders, grabs, doors, etc., and separate ends and roofs with nothing molded on that can be used as masters to cast more for upgrading el cheapo rolling stock.

        

 

Those Blueprint kits are very nice.

 steve 

[Ace-Garageguy]

Also brought home a complete Lindberg 1/48 Snark kit. Not really cheap (different vendor from the train stuff), but less than online. 

I buggered a Snark model (Revell) when I was a kid, and always kinda wanted to do a nice job on one.

Some of the rivet detail at the fuselage seams will be tricky to get right, and I may or may not change the raised panel lines to scribed, but it's worth a shot.

[Brian Austin]

I could not resist this O Gauge 1930s cast aluminum Zephyr set,  though it's a bit compressed in length. 

Edited October 5 by Brian Austin

[Earl Marischal]

2 hours ago, Brian Austin said:

I could not resist this O Gauge 1930s cast aluminum Zephyr set,  though it's a bit compressed in length. 

That’s an interesting score. Any idea how old it is? Prewar possibly?

steve

[Brian Austin]

I am not well versed in prewar American Flyer (prior to the brand's move to S Gauge) but this is probably from the mid to late 1930s.

[LDO]

1/48 scale resin kit of the “Red Baron” racing plane. It was a highly modified P-51 Mustang. It had a 2,240 ci Rolls-Royce Griffon V-12 with contra rotating props and a larger horizontal stabilizer, among other modifications. It set a world speed record of 499mph, before crashing. The pilot survived, but the plane did not. I’m really happy to have found this. It has been out of production for a while. 

[Ace-Garageguy]

5 hours ago, LDO said:

1/48 scale resin kit of the “Red Baron” racing plane...

Way cool.   

[Volzfan59]

Grass seed and three bales of hay.

 

 

Edit; I grew up in East Tennessee. Every yard that I’ve ever put in, be it for my father as a kid or on some of the houses that I’ve built, I’ve always put down a light covering of hay or preferably straw. Keeps the birds from eating the seed, keeps the wind from blowing it away and I guess the rotting hay/straw helps to fertilize the ground. Fast for to this morning, the guy at the hardware store said he’s never heard of doing that down here in SE Arkansas? My wife said the same thing, she grew up here. Is that just an east TN mountainous area thing?

Edited October 8 by Volzfan59

[TonyK]

I've heard of using hay or straw but around here people use peat moss, a little topsoil or some other purpose made covering. Just saw a yard in my neighborhood where the owner put down fresh grass seed with nothing covering it. Not a good idea.

[Ace-Garageguy]

Another remarkable score on vintage HO scale model railroad 'craftsman' kits.

I had to run some errands this AM, so arranged to be in the neighborhood of one of the 'antique malls' where I've scored before when they opened at noon, but I'd promised myself I wouldn't buy anything if they hadn't restocked since two weeks ago, and particularly not unless the restocking included vintage 'craftsman' kits I'm so fond of.

Well, the universe must have heard me, 'cause not only had they restocked, but there was a literal pile of Ambroid, Main Line Models, La Belle, Bev-Bel, and Ye Olde Huff-N-Puff milled-siding-and-sticks wood kits, die-cast metal Ulrich kits, and a whole bunch of vintage plastic Roundhouse and 'blue box' Athearn kits in fallen-flag liveries I didn't have as well....mostly for $5 each. Long out of production, prices have been steadily climbing, and now the asking online runs around $30-$40 each, including shipping. So five bucks each is a helluva deal.

And yeah, I could do what the resellers do...search out and buy collections for pennies on the dollar, but that's just not my thing. The resellers make some money for their time and effort, and I only get stuck with what I really want...while still paying well under going market prices.

The wood kits are challenging, to say the least, but built up they make exquisite models...and were the top of the genre in the 1950s and '60s.

Ambroid introduced their "one of five thousand" collectors series in 1957. They were expensive then, and way beyond my skill level anyway, but I marveled at seeing what the wizard geezers could accomplish when I was a fumble-fingered kid way back in the dim recesses of time. About as close to pure scratch-building as you can get, they require the kind of effort most modelers simply won't put out today...like sealing and sanding wood parts that are supposed to represent metal, so the grain won't show, prior to painting.

The images below represent what you get with these things: lotsa little wood parts, a few metal castings, some brass ladder stock, decals, wire, and a comprehensive instruction sheet with full size patterns. You have to cut (to length) and often shape most of the wood yourself, wire stock and staples are used for brake plumbing, grabs, and stirrups, and the cast metal parts, though very finely made, usually require substantial cleanup of flash as well.

   

           Built photo online:       

 

Tank cars are built up from dowels with turned ends, wrapped with rivet-embossed paper, with cast metal domes and sills and other assorted details. They may sound primitive, but again, they build into beautiful models that are far more evocative than lovely and boring perfectly scaled mass-produced plastic.

      Built photo online:    

 

There were several LaBelle passenger kits in the pile too, with folded paper diaphragms. Wow.

Most of the wood kits don't include trucks and couplers, but the previous owner had put some in several boxes, and I've been buying them in lots as they come up cheap too.

One kinda sad note: one of the kit boxes had a Christmas label "To Poppy, from Chris", in a child's writing. As it was one of the kits that already had added high-end trucks in the box as well, I'm pretty sure Poppy appreciated the gift.

Mixed in with the plastic-kit restock were a few old time freight cars in the Gorre & Dephetid and Devil's Gulch & Helengon liveries, commemorating John Allen's spectacular layout he started in 1947, tragically destroyed by fire in 1973 shortly after his death...so the ones I didn't have followed me home too.

There's a lot more really cool stuff in this haul, but last time I posted a long one of these, I got the dreaded 404, and most of the post was lost.

Though for the foreseeable future I've had to abandon the plans for a large layout in AZ, building the old vintage kits will still let me enjoy a hobby I loved long before I started building model cars.

 

Edited October 20 by Ace-Garageguy
punctiliousness