Full Build! On30 Crane Car | Thunder Mesa Model Railroad

Howdy folks, Dave here for Thunder Mesa Trains. Welcome back to the studio, where today I have a small rolling stock project for the ON30 Thunder Mesa Mining Company layout. So I was shopping online recently for something specific for the layout, and while I was looking for that specific thing, I came across a listing for something else. And I thought, you know, that's pretty cool. I think I need one of those. So I put it in my cart and I bought it. And, you know, I'll often do this because a lot of these small manufacturers, they don't produce these things very long or in very large quantity. This is usually some guy in his garage with a 3D printer or something that's turning these things out. So if I see something that I like, I try to pick it up and, you know, and then I stick it on the shelf and sometimes forget about it, unfortunately, which is why I've instituted a new policy. When it shows up at my door, I'm going to build it. I'm going to finish it and use it at my earliest opportunity rather than putting it over there on the shelf of shame with all the other unfinished projects. So that's what we're going to do today. I found this really cool boom car in ON30, and we're going to put that together. This came well packaged. This fellow's company is called Ernest Trains, and you can check them out. They're on YouTube at Ernest Trains. They've got some product updates and some build tutorials. Awesome. So let's see what's in here. Ah, okay. Got some resin parts. It's got a bit of a bend to it, and these are all 3D printed. You know, a build like this kind of dovetails into a larger conversation that I've been having with my friends and I've been thinking about is how with the advent of 3D printing and laser cutters and things like that, small manufacturers like Ernest and others are able to, I don't know if his name is Ernest. I'm just assuming. Ernest Trains, they're able to fill the gap that's been left in the market as larger companies have kind of become more cautious and backed away because, you know, building things at scale, you know, large runs of things is expensive, all the tooling and things like that. So, you know, smaller manufacturers have stepped into that and are producing all kinds of great stuff. And that's why I say that, there's the hook, you know, the hobby isn't dying. People have been saying the hobby is dying since probably the 1930s. It's not dying, it's just changing again. And we're getting more and more cool stuff, one-of-a-kind stuff or short-run stuff from small manufacturers. So it's actually kind of a golden age for this kind of stuff. Look at this beautiful donkey engine. This is what made me pull the trigger and buy this thing. Oh yeah, that's pretty cool. Got some trucks, got the deck for the car. It's a 16-foot car in O scale, on 30. And we've got a couple of different hooks here. Another part of the boom, a little guide or pulley for the cable. Looks like there's just a little bit of the 3D printing sprues to clean up off of here. I'm gonna check and see if I have some wheels for this. And it looks like I'll need to provide my own screws, tap some holes here, and provide some KD couplers for that as well. Most of these parts are very, very clean. Don't see a lot of 3D print boogers on here. Here's one right here. Just use my nippers to take those off. And I'll take the rest of these screws off of the donkey engine. You can pick yourself up a pair of nippers like this from Micromark. Just want something that cuts clean and flush without putting a lot of stress on the parts. So with these small shops and manufacturers jumping in to fill that void that's been left by the larger manufacturers, ON30 is really kind of returning to its roots back in the day when it was, you know, just a couple of guys in their workshop or their garage or their hobby room taking apart HO locomotives and scratch building O scale superstructures on top to create a affordable alternative to ON3. You know, when everything back then all you could get was rather expensive brass. So we're kind of back around to that again. ON30 is very much a scratch builder scale, kit basher scale, but that's one of the reasons I like it. Yeah, big one. I suppose if you want to, you can leave this thing free to spin in here. This flat car has a slight sway in the middle. I don't think that's intentional, but I kind of like it. I think I'm going to leave it. Now with those pieces all cleaned up, I'm ready to get some paint on them, and I'm going to prime them with some Rust-Oleum rattle can paint. For these pieces, I'm going to use a flat black, and then for the flat car and the trucks and these hooks, I think, I'll use a dark brown. Then once this paint's dry, I'll flip the pieces over and paint the other sides too. All right, let that first base coat dry. Everything turned out pretty satisfactory. Now I want to mask off everything below the wooden deck on the flat car because I want to paint this a different color. Let's take some blue painter's tape and come right up to the bottom of that decking right there. Let me just fold this in. Another piece right there. And the color I'm using for this, once again, some Rust-Oleum flat camo, kind of a light grayish tan color. I went over to the Ernest Train's YouTube channel to see if there might be a tutorial or something on this, but I couldn't find anything. He had a lot of cool HO content, if that's what you're looking for. He's got that there, but I couldn't find anything on this car. So I went back to the eBay listing where I found it, and I printed off some of his photos because, as you can see, it's got some kind of complex rigging going on here. And so I thought maybe I could look at these photos and figure it out. He's got these clever little ball and socket joints. So this is going to go in here. And then this goes here on the outside of that. And this goes in here. Now let's see how we did on this. Now I want to brush paint the, just the edges of the flat car frame with some of this Apple Barrel Chocolate Bar. Yeah, it doesn't look much like chocolate, but it does look a lot like old railroad equipment. So you can see we've got the red on the edges and still the darker brown underneath. And then some dry brushing up here on the deck as well, using some grays and tans to make this look more like old weathered wood. And then a dark acrylic wash over the top of all of that. That's going to seep back in to the wood grain, which has been 3D printed on there. Now I want to dry brush the whole donkey engine and all the parts of the crane with some pavement and some granite gray that's going over all of those rivets and little bits of hardware, gears here, bringing all of that out. And I've got these two dials here on the boiler. It's going to give each one of those a little spot of gloss white. And on these handles here, I just want to hit the ends of them with some Vallejo red. And we'll go back and touch up the raised edge of those dials with some black. Now I also want to have some sort of mechanical connection between the steam donkey and the flat car. So right now it just kind of sits in there and flops around and, you know, one good bump and it's going to go flying. So what I want to do, see there's a little divot there, I'm going to drill a hole here and here. I'm going to use some 1.5 millimeter brass rod and have it coming out of here, epoxy probably into here, and then that'll just slip down into the car like that. Now this isn't scary at all. Piece of cake. Mix up some two-part five-minute epoxy and we'll get some on the end of this brass rod. There we go. Now I just got to hold that for five, ten minutes. Slip this off. I'm going to leave, I only need about an eighth of an inch sticking out there. I think we've got it. When I first started this project, I thought that this crane car build would be done by now and you would have already watched the video and hopefully enjoyed it. However, after putting a whole bunch of work into the flat car, I ended up just setting the whole project aside for a couple of days, two, three days, which I will sometimes do. If it's not gelling, you know, just the way I want it to, sometimes I'll just set the project aside and go work on other stuff and, you know, just let it, you know, ruminate in my mind while I'm working on other things to solve whatever problems might be there. And so I did that and the problems I'm having with this build, it's nothing structural, has nothing to do with the way the kit is designed or anything like that. It's more of, say you wanted to just use this crane as a static model and have it sit on a siding and look cool, then everything I've done up till now is perfect. That's exactly what you'll get. However, if like me, you actually want this to be an operational piece of rolling stock on your model railroad, then there are three main issues with this that need to be addressed. And issue number one is clearance. Okay, you've got this big crane boom arm coming out. And in order to run it on a train, this would either need to be at the end of the train, so this is hanging off the back, or you would need to have a dedicated second flat car, like an idler flat in here for the for the boom arm to hang over. And then you might still run into issues of clearance going around corners and things where this might swing out and hit your scenery. You could alternatively have the crane arm folded up like so, but then you've got clearance issues this way. This is not going to fit through your tunnels. It's certainly not going to fit through my tunnels on the Thunder Mesa layout. So that's issue number one. Issue number two is one of weight. I like to add weight to my cars to make them track better, make them operate better, you know, reduce derailments and things like that. 3D resin prints are pretty lightweight and there's no way to add additional weight to the car other than, you know, with the metal wheels. So that's an issue. And the third issue is one of, I guess, operational believability. Trying to imagine how your little quarter-inch scale people would operate this thing. And so the conclusion I have come to, just for me, just for my railroad operational purposes, is that this flat car that I've been putting so much work into is actually too small for this. And that's ironic because the thing that really attracted me to this build in the first place was the fact that this was a 16-foot car. I love 16-foot cars. They have a lot of charm, a lot of character, look great with a bunch of them strung together going around the layout. But I think in this particular instance, a 16-foot car is just too small. So I'm going to take this and all the work I put into it and I'm going to set it aside for now. And I'm going to reach into the past, reach into my scrap box and pull out one of these standard size Bachman ON30 flat cars. And I think these are like 26 feet long. Is that right? Four to five, yeah, about 26 feet long. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to fabricate some parts here, probably cut them on the laser cutter, and we're going to use those to mount the crane on this flat car like this. But I'm not throwing out all this work. No, no, no. I'm going to come back to this flat car and I think we're going to turn this into a blacksmith car, which will go along with the work train, you know. But that'll be in the next installment. Right now, I want to finish this up. So I fabricated a couple of pieces out of laser board. This stuff's about a 32nd of an inch thick or 0.035 inches if you want to be technical. And basically what it is, it's an iron plate that will be bolted to the top of the flat car. And then there's a second circular iron plate on top. And then this will fit down in there like that and rotate on top of this iron plate rather than, you know, down in the hole. So I'll get some yellow glue on the back of this disc and a brass rod up through here. Center this on top of the other piece, and that way those holes will be perfectly aligned. Now I'll paint this a dark old rusty iron color. So I painted the Bachman flat car with pretty much the same colors and techniques I used on the 16-foot flat. It's always amazing to me how much you can improve the look of these plastic cars with just a little bit of paint. All of this weathering on the deck here was done with watercolors. Just subsequent washes of cobalt blue and burnt sienna mixed together. Get that nice weathered wood look. Also drilled a hole right here, which will line up with our iron plate. Now I want to get some weathering on this, and for that I'm going to use some These pan pastels can make a bit of a mess, so I've got this taped down to a piece of cardboard. I'm going to start by going over the whole thing with this dark rust color, and then go around the outside edges with some lighter shades, blending this all with a soft brush. Now I'll get some clear matte finish on there to lock that into place, and once the matte finish is on there, you can come back and punch up some of the colors a little more, and then hit it with another layer of this, and kind of build it up in layers. That matte finish gives a little bit of tooth to it too, so it's going to hold on to the pastels a little bit better. Lighten this up around the edges with the lighter shade of rust, and now with another coat of matte finish on there, it should be safe to handle without getting it all over my fingers. Now I'm going to glue this to the car deck using some Eileen's tacky glue, and since this is a PBA, that might seem like an unusual choice, but I found it actually works really well for sticking things like this laser board, which is a fiber board, to plastic. Gives you a little bit more working time than a cyanoacrylate or something like that, and it really grabs and holds right away. I've got a small hole drilled right there, my toothpick through here, line that up, and I do need to clamp this until that glue dries. Okay, that's a little better, I think. Now the frame just snaps back in here. It's actually the truck screws that hold this in. Before I get too much further on this, I want to add some lettering to the car. I'm going to use some Woodland Scenics dry transfers, and I made a determination a while ago that all of the non-revenue, you know, maintenance-of-way type equipment on Thunder Mesa would be numbered in the zero series, so it'd be 06, 05, and this one I think is going to be 08. So, first thing I want to do is find, uh, yeah, I've got 08 right next to each other on here, which makes my life a little easier. I don't have to mix and match numbers. A sharp hobby knife with a number 11 blade. Then I take a piece of scotch tape, pick that letter or that number up off of there, trim away most of this tape. Having that little piece of tape on there allows you to line the numbers or letters up where you want them. Make sure it's nice and straight. I'm going to take a soft lead number two pencil and go over it. You've got to press a little harder than you think you do. Now, the tape here can act like a little hinge. I can lift this up and, let me see, I missed a couple spots there. Put that back down. So, our dry transfers as nerve-wracking as water slide decals, it's a close second most of the time. Take the backing sheet, put it over the top, and really go over it again to get good adhesion. Turn the car around, same thing on the other side. That white lettering is always a little bit too bright for my taste, so I'll go over the tops of the letters with this dark brown pan pastel. Colored chalks work as well. Get some more weathering on the rest of the car here while I'm at it. I've also painted the trucks. Go over those, let's see, dark rust, brush it up, a little light rust on those springs. I also painted the centers of these Bachman wheels. That always makes them look a hundred percent better. And the brake wheel, of course. These are supposed to be a press fit in this hole, but I always find that a dab of CA on the end keeps them from falling out and getting lost. All right, now I think we're on the right track. Now, I figured this big iron plate would need some large bolts holding it on there, so I've got these nice brass ones from Precision Scale. Put three on each side here, that should do it, I think. A little bit of CA down in the hole, and of course the trick with any kind of nut bolt washer castings is to grip them just right with the tweezers so you can get them in the hole but not have them go flying across the room. Now, I have been studying and studying these photos and trying to figure out the rigging on this thing, and I went online and I looked for some some prototype photos, but I couldn't find any of this exact steam donkey crane, so I'm pretty much reliant on what he's done here. I am no expert on these cranes by any stretch, and I'm sure if I do it wrong, someone in the comments will point out all the mistakes. One of the most challenging aspects of this is this block just kind of hangs in the air here. It's held in place by the cables. Basically, I'm stiffening the thread with CA and gluing it at all the points where it connects. Anytime I do something like this, I have a lot of sympathy, a lot of empathy for guys who build ship models and all of that rigging on there. This is easy by comparison. So now this comes through here, and this is going to come through here. I just need to tie this off and put a little CA on there to lock that knot. This goes down through here, through that pulley, and then it comes back up here through the second pulley there. Now I need to bring this around behind here, behind this drum, and glue it into place. I'll hold that taut once again until the glue sets up. I can trim this off right there. Start by gluing one end of this thread to the top side of this second spool. Now I want to glue the final section of the crane arm on here. Again, I'm making sure that the height of all this is in line with the tunnels on the layout, so nothing's going to hang out. That's why I've got the boom arm kind of in a somewhat down position. Now this comes up through here, goes through the right side of these two double pulleys, and that goes all the way around that pulley, and then gets tied off on this iron ring right there. That creates the leverage for raising and lowering this part of the arm. And all these places where I'm putting spots of CA, I'm going to go back and touch all of that up so you won't see that shiny glue on there at all. And I'll snip this off right under there. And for the final cable, once again, I'm going to start by gluing thread to the top of this bottom drum. Actually, while I let that glue dry, I'm going to go ahead and mount the couplers on the flat car because we're going to be doing all the final assembly here in a minute. This is going to be a lot easier to do now when I can still turn the car upside down without damaging the crane. Got some KD number 5 knuckle couplers. I always cut the trip pins off of these for my layout, for the Thunder Mesa layout, because I don't use the magnetic end couplers and because my layout would predate those kind of air hoses that those are supposed to represent. I'm going to make sure that's self-centered on there, so I don't want to put the screw in too tightly. Sometimes these KD centering springs can be a bit of a tight fit in these old Bachmann coupler boxes. And now I want to mount the crane on the car because I'm going to need it on there to determine the height for the hook. Okay, now this comes up through here and goes through the other side of these two double pulleys and then we'll go down through the big one here and I'll thread that through the lock and tackle on the hook. Despite my best efforts, you can see the crane still hangs out way past the end of the car. And then there's a second hook that attaches under the boom here and the cable gets tied off to that. A couple of good square knots should do it. And a little snippety-doo-dah. I'll paint that thread with a little bit of diluted white glue so it hangs right. Now I'll use some Vallejo Flat Black to touch up any blue shine. I'll use my black acrylic wash to add some oil and grease stains here on the deck of the flat car. Now I just want to do some final weathering with my PanPastels, using mostly this dark rust color, this one right here, and make it look like this has been a hard-working piece of equipment for a long time. All the cables, the spools, a lot of grime that would build up around this metal plate, so I'm using some of this dark brown to represent that. This lighter ivory shade is great for water stains and alkali buildup over here where this valve is. Probably be some of that. Just a little bit of a lighter rust here and there. Easy to overdo it, you know. You want it to look well used and you don't want it to look like it should be scrapped. All right, that's probably good. Get some clear matte finish on there. All done. The more I look at this deck, the more I think it just cries out for some more details and clutter and things, but I've got to save something for next time. For now, my final thoughts on this build are that this is not a perfect kit, but it is a really, really nice collection of parts. And sometimes a nice collection of parts are all you really need to get started, to spark a new idea, a new creative direction, take you someplace you weren't planning to go. And this one certainly had its twists and turns and took me in a different direction than I thought it was going to go. Thanks for coming along with me through all that, you know, the thinking it through and figuring things out, and that's all part of the creative process. Sometimes you have a clear idea of where you think a project is going to go and it takes a sudden left turn, like with that flat car, and you know, ends up very, very different from what you originally envisioned. But that's what the creative process is. Making is messy. But as I mentioned earlier, I am going to return to that flat car. I think we're going to turn it into a blacksmith car, so I hope you won't miss that. I hope you're subscribed with those notifications turned on, so YouTube will let you know when the next video is coming from Thunder Mesa Trains. Until then, you know, you can also follow Thunder Mesa for free over on Patreon or as a paid member. That's patreon.com slash thundermesa or on Instagram at thunder.mesa. And check out the resources that are available on the Thunder Mesa Studio website at thundermesa.studio. As always, a huge thank you to our Patreon members who help to make all of these projects and all of these videos possible. Until next time, keep moving forward everybody, even if moving forward means changing direction. Adios for now.