I think what Tom is referring to is the truck mount--that enormous clunky
thing--rather than the fishbelly underframe.
Certainly with the plastic flats I shall laminate some Evergreen scribed
planking, particularly to conceal the big holes
in the deck, replace the brake wheel and drill out the stake pockets (I suspect
I shall have the energy and motivation
to do that no more than twice).
My conversions tend to be only the old really mass-market items that have been
around forever--mostly because they
are cheap, being so common. The more recent Lionel production does NOT strike
me as cheap. My general approach
to the AF conversions I've done and propose doing is that the car must look
respectable when I am done but not require
enormous effort or time in the reworking (I think I am a respectable kit and
even scratch builder after all these years, but
I mostly intend to spend that much effort in O scale, my primary interest).
And it makes no sense to me to invest more
than--at most--$20 in a conversion, including trucks and Kadees, when AM cars
are readily available for that (and occasionally
less), and for a bit more SHS cars which are of a high-enough quality to need
little tweaking, even for the most fastidious.
Frankly, I didn't go into S scale to put lots of time or effort or money into
locomotives and rolling stock--some, just not a lot--
as I can and will continue to do that in O scale. It was the amount of quite
good to excellent commercial products now
available that tempted me in the first place as something to enjoy playing with
without all that is involved with my more serious
interests. Perhaps that is a variation on toy train mentality. Guilty as
charged.
Jace Kahn
General Manager
Ceres & Canisteo RR Co./Champlain County Traction Co.
> With the help of Jack Troxell and his milling machine, we chucked a
> couple of the metal flats and milled off the deck. I didn't go so far
> as to remove all of it but I was able to overlay NE wood to make a very
> nice deck. I have plans on doing one more where I will do exactly
> that. At that point the fishbelly underframe can be removed rather
> easily. There is a photo of a Milwaukee Road flat with a load of farm
> machinery setting on a siding. The deck was rotten and part of the
> machinery dropped through the deck--a great thing to model IMHO.
>
> Maybe Pieter or someone else (who enjoys being a bit more of the
> prototypical) can back this up, but I think it does need a fishbelly
> however. If it had a cast underframe,Evergreen strips could be used as
> a replacement rather easily.
> > Well, the Flyonel USRA Mike and possibly the relatively recent
> > Challenger could be candidates for conversion to scale, but Lionel
> > will have none of it. Like Jace, I have some old Flyer flatcars, two
> > cast metal, two plastic. No problem to convert the plastic, but how do
> > I grind down that ridiculous underbody nonsense of the cast metal cars?
> > Tom
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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