Re: Leadville Designs Baggage/Express 1 in C&Sn3

Posted by Jim Courtney on Oct 07, 2023; 8:50pm
URL: http://c-sng-discussion-forum.254.s1.nabble.com/Leadville-Designs-Baggage-Express-1-in-C-Sn3-tp19129p19141.html

Hey Dave,

I hope my project is helpful for you and others building Leadville Designs wood kits. By all means, press on with your B&S boxcars project--and maybe start another thread to share your progress.

Having built a couple of Bill's 1898 boxcar kits, I highly recommend that you do a "test build" of one kit first, from start to finish, and keep notes of problems encountered and your solutions. Then batch build the remaining two kits at once. I'm learning that these wood kits require about 15-20 minutes of work at each step, followed by several hours of glue drying.

I assure you that construction problems will be encountered, parts that don't fit and have to be modified, or replaced with strip wood. Be aware of the phenomenon of "laser bevel". Laser cuts in wood have a slight bevel on the cut edge. With thin pieces of wood, like the side sheathing, this is negligible, but with thicker pieces, like underframe sills or those protruding end beams on the J&S boxcars, the bevel can be significant. Instead of the pieces having a rectangular cross section, it's more like a trapezoid. I sand the pieces square with my NWSL "True Sander", using a small drafting square as a fence. In some cases it makes more sense to replace the laser part with very square strip wood, or even styrene strip.

Geoff Hamway has built many a Leadville Designs boxcar kit for his first-decade RGS layout, including several B&S boxcars from the same kit, albeit in S scale. Perhaps he can opine and give you some construction advice on these cars.
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Meanwhile, as to the baggage car project, I'm confronting my irrational fear of clerestory roofs and have spent the last few days working on the baggage car roof. Perhaps a progress update with photos tonight or tomorrow, depending on the glue drying . . .