A Gruesome Gulch Boxcar! | GGRR 28

Howdy folks, Dave here at Thunder Mesa Studio where spooky season is in full swing as I begin another project for the OM-30 Gruesome Gulps layout. This time out I want to build one more piece of rolling stock to run through the spooky underworld realm of Cadaver Caverns. So far we've got the creepy combine and the coffin car, but I think what this train really needs to finish it off is an express box car right up here behind the locomotive. So what I have in mind is something inspired by the old Railway Express Agency cars, but instead of the Railway Express Agency, this is going to be the Underworld Express Agency. One way shipping to regions beyond where their slogan is, if you can't take it with you, ship it via Underworld Express. And once again, I'm going to be cannibalizing an old HO kit as a starting point for this build, just like I did for all the other bits of rolling stock on Gruesome Gulch. This is another IHC Maintenance-of-Way gondola kit, and I'm going to be using the frame and probably the deck from this, and probably the trucks also. So just to get started, I'll be cutting off these stake pockets, and I'll also want to cut these plastic end beams off. I'm going to be replacing them with real wood. Now I can just take my sanding block and go all the way around, make sure that's all nice and square. And this kit is for a 30-foot car in HO, but an O-scale it's probably going to be around yeah, about 17 feet long. Now I want to cut some new side beams and end beams from some O-scale 4x8. Use some cyanoacrylate to glue these side beams on first, and I'll go ahead and glue the underframe in here too. These don't have a lot of detail, but the thing I like about them is they're cast metal, so the car doesn't need any additional weight added to it beyond this underframe. Plenty heavy enough to track well. Now I'm going to clamp these two end beams together so I can notch them for the coupler pocket. I'm going to cut down in here about, not very far, just, you know, about a 30-second of an inch, and just whittle that bit away. And I'll just use a flat file to finish that up, and I can glue those on. Now I'm going to drill some holes in this end beam for the truss rod bolts, and I like to use a little track nail and my pin vise to get the holes started so the drill bit won't wander. Now I can just put these in with a drop of CA in each one of the holes. Another nice detail to have is a coupler block up above the coupler pocket, so I'm cutting a couple of those out of some O-scale 2x4, glue that on there, right in the middle. Now I'll drill through that block and we'll add some tiny little nut bolt washer castings to those. And that's what the finished end looks like. Now I can get some flat black on all of this and the truss as well. Well the black paint is dry on these goodies now, and we can move on to the next step. And you know, if you watch the coffin car build, it's pretty much identical up to this point. But now it's going to get interesting because I'm going to start building the box car body. So come on over here and take a look at what we've got for that. I'm going to be using a combination of some laser cut parts that I designed and cut from some 35-1000 of an inch thick laser board, and some printed paper textures. This is a technique I really like to use for something that's got a lot of complex graphics on it. Underworld Express Agency, one way shipping to regions beyond. Got the road number, UEX13. Created a logo for the Underworld Express Agency, which at least harkens back to the colors of the Railway Express Agency, and of course the slogan down here. Can't take it with you, ship the Underworld Express. And what I want to do now is take these parts and laminate them to some illustration board. This is some Crescent 300 illustration board. It's about a sixteenth of an inch thick. And now I'm going to spray the back of this with some Super 77 adhesive and glue it to the back of the illustration board. No matter how often I show this technique, I still get a lot of questions about it. I did a whole video on the printed paper process, I guess you'd call it. Did a structure called Cordelia's Cafe, and you can check that out. I'll put a link. I've got some glue on the back of that, and then I like to use this roller, this brayer. Got a hobby knife here with a good sharp number 11 blade in it. A question I'm sometimes asked is, why don't I use the laser to cut out printed parts like this? And that's a really good question, actually. And the reason is, the hardest thing about that would be the registration. That's the relationship between the printed lines, the printed parts, and the cut lines. They have to line up absolutely perfectly, and it can be done, but not with the equipment that I have. It would require a much more sophisticated camera setup than what I have on my Flux Beambox laser. It's a good camera, but not good enough for perfect registration. So this is just easier. Cut it out by hand. Now I'm mixing up a dark bluish black to paint the interior and the edges of all of these pieces. And, of course, carefully painting the edges is what makes a technique like this work. For the doors, I've laminated those to some 25 thou laser board. My plan here is to have doors that will actually slide, and we'll see how that works out. After I get these cut out, I'll do the same thing again. I'll paint the backs and the edges bluish black. On these laser cut pieces that make up basically the trim and door rails, I did a little bit of etching on them. I etched in some bolt head detail, which is my new favorite trick on the laser cutter. Now I'm just cleaning that up. I use a Scotch-Brite pad to clean the char off. This is the top door rail that goes on this piece of frame right here. These tiny little boogers are the door hangers for the sliding doors. Delicate surgery. These little boogers. All right. And these parts, I'm going to go ahead and paint these flat black. While the paint dries on that stuff, I can start gluing up these corners, and I'm going to reinforce all of these corners with some 6x6 and drop in this wall. I'll add a little bracing along this top rail as well, the top of the wall. Now this is going to fit down on top of the frame. I'll go back and touch up all of these beams, paint everything flat black on the inside. Start adding the doors and the trim. The black is dry on these pieces now, so I'm going to do a little dry brushing with some dark blue-gray to help bring out that etched in detail just a little bit. Okay. Let's put the doors on. I'm going to get some glue on the back of this rail, and I'm going to put this door on here, but I'm not going to glue it on. I just want to kind of set it in place. Now I'll glue the frame on over the top. Now I can put these door hangers on, and those get glued to the door, but not to the rail. All right. Take the clamps off and see how we did. I love it when a plan comes together. Now with the doors on and all of that squared away, I can add these end gable pieces. Just a little bit of trim that helps to support the roof in the right spot. I've got some tiny little Grant Line door latches. This is from their set of narrow gauge boxcar hardware. A couple of drops of CA on the back, and then I can hopefully glue this in place on the door and on the door frame. Two pieces. Now these are some corner straps that I cut and etched out of some 15 thou laser board. Put those in, those iron straps at the corners. These are pre-scored, but they need to be folded, and I found the easiest way to do that is just holding in my needle nose and fold one side over like that. You get a nice crisp fold on that corner. Each corner gets two sets of straps. I've got the wider ones that go down near the bottom, and these narrower ones that go about halfway up. For these, I've measured up and put a little tiny pencil mark there about four feet up from the bottom of the car, so I know right where to put these. Now I can get started on the roof. I have a piece of 25 thou laser board that I've scored with six inch wide boards, and that will fit on top of there. I've scored it down the middle too so I can bend it. I've got some tiny little roof brackets that will get glued onto that, and some 1x8 boards for the roof walk itself. So now I need to get all of this painted flat black, and I can start applying it to the model. While I wait for the paint to dry on the roof parts, I think I can go ahead and glue the boxcar body to the frame. I also want to add a ridge beam to the center of the car to help support that roof. This is a piece of O scale 4x4. Scoop that right on in there. Now get some glue all the way around the edges. We can put the roof on, I think. Check the ends, make sure that's lined up just right. Do the old finger clamp for a while. Now I've got seven little brackets for the roof walk, and you probably can't see, but there's some little etched lines on here that tell me where to put these, so I've already got it measured out. And the last one right here on the end. Now get some glue on the top of these, and I can add the boards for the roof walk itself. Now I want to do some dry brushing up here on the roof with some of that blue-gray. Now I want to drill some holes for grab irons, and I've created a little template out of some leftover laser board to make that a little bit easier. Just lay this on the side of the car, and I've already got holes drilled in the template, so I just need to mark those spots by pushing a pin through the holes. Now I can just drill those through and install my grab irons. Over on this side of the car, I can just flip the template upside down, flip it over, and mark the spots for the single grab iron on this side. Now proceed by putting a single drop of CA in each one of these holes and lower the grab irons in. I've got some white metal castings from Weissman Model Services. Paint up real nice. I painted them flat black. Try to dry fit each one before I glue it in so there's no surprises. Surprises are bad. Something like this. I almost put that one on upside down. What do you know about that? Speaking of surprises, just a little bit of patience goes a long way. Probably a good idea to put a couple up here on the roof, too. Now I can go ahead and add these stirrup steps, too. These I laser cut. I did a little etching there for the bolts holding them on. I think it's about time to get this thing up on its wheels now. First I want to add the couplers, though. Adding some centering springs for some KD number fives. Go ahead and snip off the magnetic trip pin because there are no air brakes on the gruesome gulch so it wouldn't need those lines going through there. Now, as usual, you just want to tighten that down just enough and back it off about a quarter turn to make sure the coupler spring self-centers. I've always found it much easier to put the couplers on before the trucks because then the trucks are in the way when you're trying to do this. It's a lot easier this way. I'll give the truck side frames a quick dry brush with some gray to bring out the detail on those. Put the wheel sets back in. Rolling pretty good. It's alive. Still needs a brake wheel. I'm going to reuse the brake wheel from the IHC kit. I'm cutting a new stave for it out of some 32-thou brass rod. CA on the end of that. Put that in there. I'll paint this flat black. Now, we're almost to the finish line on this project, but I just want to stop for a minute and acknowledge the fact that I haven't shown every single step in the process. That's because that would be virtually impossible to do in the time we have in these videos. There's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes that you didn't necessarily see in this build or builds like this. There's the entire design process for all of the laser cut parts. There's fitting those and making sure they all work together correctly the way they're supposed to. That's half a day or a day of work that is not represented here in the build. Unfortunately, I can't show everything in every video, otherwise the video would be four hours long and nobody would watch it, so it's a compromise. Thanks for watching. Let's finish this up. Just doing a little dry brushing on this brake wheel with some lighter gray before I put it on. I've got just a little ring of laser board. I'm going to glue this on and then the brake wheel will go down through that. There. That hole. I did manage to cut a little mounting block for the brake wheel stave, which will attach it to the side of the car. Inevitably, with something like this, there are going to be a few spots you're going to need to touch up, no matter how careful you are. So that's one of my final steps. Go around and touch things up here and there. A little bit of black, a little bit of blue mixed together, just to get rid of any obvious scrapes or scratches or big ugly glue spots. Got to look at all these white metal castings and make sure none of the paint got scratched off of those. Now, the gag here with this car, of course, is the graphics on the side. I want people to be able to see those and read those, so I can't have the door all the way open, because it would block the joke. But I do have enough room to leave it open about just a crack, and then you can still read the graphics on here. And so I'm going to have it open about that much, and I've got another Mini Prince skeleton here. I just painted him up. Rearranged his limbs just a little bit, so he's kind of peeking out sideways, and he'll be looking out from the door. So I'm going to open that up, glue his feet to the deck, and see how that looks. I want him right about there. There we go. Now I just want to do a little bit of light weathering with my colored chalks, mostly shades of gray. Don't want to do too much, though, because with this printed paper technique, chalks can actually obscure the printed detail too much. So just a little bit here and there to kind of blend everything together, make it look like it's been down there in the underworld for many, many, many years, almost an eternity. Mix in a little bit of that ultramarine blue, trying to match the printed color on here as close as I can, just a slightly lighter shade. I'll add just a little bit of rust color on some of these iron parts. Pretty damp down there in the underworld. Things are going to rust. And some more blue grays up here on the roof. That's not half bad. Now I've got a nice, even coat of clear matte finish over the entire car. And there it is, the last planned piece of rolling stock for the Gruesome Gulch layout. Doesn't mean I won't do more, I just don't have any planned right now. Let's put it to work, shall we? Thank you all so much for watching today. I hope you enjoyed the build and the video. If you did, you know, like, subscribe, share, hit the notification bell so you'll see more from Thunder Mesa Studio, because there are a couple more projects coming down the line on the Gruesome Gulch layout between now and Halloween, and I hope you don't want to miss those. Until then, you can also follow us over on Instagram at Thunder.Mesa and see what's new on the Thunder Mesa Studio website at ThunderMesa.Studio. And of course, if you really enjoy what we're doing here at the channel and would like to show your support, you can do what these great folks did and head on over to Patreon.com slash Thunder Mesa and show your support there. Until next time, keep moving forward, my friends. Adios for now.