This topic came up on the HO Railroading group on Yahoo a couple of months back so I wanted to do a little tutorial here to try to give something back. It could easily be adapted to other scales too. To paraphrase the post on Yahoo the gentleman was tired of paying high prices for ¼ oz lead nuggets so he came up with the idea of using pennies for weight because it would only cost him pennies =]. Most Athearn and Roundhouse cars need about ½ to ¾ oz added to reach NMRA standards of 1 oz plus ½ oz per inch of length. Five pennies weight ¼ oz so it is a great way to save some money. The neat thing is that you can actually fine-tune the weight down to 1/20th of an ounce which would be plus minus a penny. Since I try to do something to do with modeling every night, usually while reading posts on the Gauge =] I worked up a “jig” and an assembly line system with favorable results. Here is the walkthrough of my process, hope this helps in your own modeling efforts.
Get together a couple of piles of 5 pennies each:
Get together a couple of piles of 5 pennies each: