Steel Loads

This week I had two days at home waiting for a carport to be installed, but that got washed out on Thursday and because of that didn’t come Friday either.  Rain is predicted on Monday so that is most unlikely as well.  So what do you do at home, when you have nothing better to do?  Modelling of course.  I wrapped up about another 26 tarpaulins or so and sold off 100 tarps on Friday afternoon.  I also got stuck into building some more large and small steel loads.  The steel loads fit into various NSW and QR wagons.  These also found a new home on Friday afternoon.  On Friday I was hoping for the postie to deliver my AMRM, as I had an article published in the April issue and I wanted to read the other articles.  Oh well, there is always Monday or Tuesday this week.  I just hope that the boss gets it out of the letter box before it gets too wet.

So on Saturday I went and picked up some more styrene at Austral Modelcraft and at RC Model Planes just down the road from the Club on the other side of the city.  It was meeting day at the Club.  While there I had a good talk to PK, Greg and Darryl.  Darryl put an order in for some steel loads for his QR HWOS wagons and some Wuiske HJS wagons.  Now I have no idea if these wagons carried small steel loads, but I guess they did considering what else could be found in one of these wagons.  So the process started when I got home from the Club.  It also continued today.  I put together 3 more large steel loads for my HWOS wagons.  I also put together 7 small steel loads for QR HJS wagons, and three more middle sized loads.  I have three more large loads ready to assemble and enough styrene (waiting for paint to dry) for further three large steel loads to be made during the week.  I will be putting up to five steel rod loads together later tonight.  These are already cut up, and once assembled and painted make up part of my steel loads on the top decks of the steel.

Two of my three HWOS steel wagon loads.  My weathered HWOS wagon is behind the loads.  The top load has some steel rods onboard.

Seven of my small steel loads for HJS type wagons.  A Wuiske HJS is in the middle of the photo, while one of my scratch built HJS wagons is at the top.

So most of the large styrene purchase I made yesterday has already been used up. 

I received some feedback on Friday about my pallets not fitting in a Wuiske HJS two abreast.  I checked my QR plan and these wagons have an inside opening of 2440mm or 8’.  Two standard pallets should fit in the wagon.  So I tested my half a dozen scratch built HJS wagons and other variants and in all of them two of my pallets fitted inside the wagon two across.  I measured one of my Wuiske models and sure enough two pallets don’t fit - almost but no cigar.  So I guess in the efforts of building a scale model, you must trade in on one of the dimensions of that model.  In this case in order to have robust sides on the wagon, they are just slightly thicker than the prototype and thus the inside measurement has to be sacrificed is about 1mm too thin.  These are the trade offs we must live with in scale modelling.

So I made a test build this afternoon for 8 pallets to be built in a single build that fits inside the Wuiske HJS.  I think it works out quite good.  This test build is reserved for one of my mates who was wanting something for inside his HJS, but if he doesn’t want it, I will offload it at an upcoming Buy and Sell in May.

One shot of a random load that can do into a QR HJS.  It is 8 standard sized pallets on the right with a few 44 gallon drums - empty and loaded ontop.

This photo is another standard load for a QR HJS wagon.  The components of the load - except the single pallets and the tarps are glued to a sheet of paper and painted a close match for a QR wagon grey.  This way the loads can be removed and stored between loaded and unloaded runs of the wagons.

With a bit of luck, and some fine weather sometime this week, my carport might go up sometime soon.