All right. After have given it some thought about the wrecked train I posted about in the HO forum, I decided I'm going to turn those wrecked cars and locomotive into an actual train wreck scene. I have removed the motor along with the gears, worms, wiring, etc. I am putting a Cummins diesel power plant in the engine compartment. How ever I want that wrecked look of a few doors slung open and half torn off showing the inside of it. Any good idea's of how I can cut these door's out without damaging the paint and without making sloppy crooked lines? I'm trying to get as close to prototype as possible. Also how can I get the roof's and sides of box cars to be bowed upward so it looks like the real thing when all that weight collapses on it self? I figured for a fire look I would go outside on a couple cinder blocks and set some old parts sprues on fire and hold what items I want to look like they caught fire over the tops of the flame just close enough to catch the soot but without melting the plastic. Thanks in advance for any info.
Need some help with locomotive power plant compartment
- Thread starter KCS
- Start date
for bending box cars and stuff.... your going to need to apply some heat.... i'm not sure exactly what would be best for this, therefore i'm not going to advise any heating method over another...
doing doors could be hard... you could allways consider having it opened by damage, maybe a car flew upwards and struck the engine, tearing some of the side off...
doing doors could be hard... you could allways consider having it opened by damage, maybe a car flew upwards and struck the engine, tearing some of the side off...
When I was building model cars we would sometimes use thread or dental floss to 'saw' a door or trunk open. you would have to drill a hole in the door corner and slowly saw the thread back and forth along the door line. unfortunetly the plastic is considerably thicker than the sheet metal that the prototype door is to it would have to be thinned via filing and sanding.
From the pictures that I've seen of train wrecks the cars stay reletivly intact if a boxcar is knocked off the tracks however the load inside will shift and sometimes the sides of the car will be bowed out for the load hitting it. this is probably best done with a soldering iron getting the plastic warm enough (don't touch the iron to the plastic! Just run ti next to it) until you can flex and bend the plastic by hand.
From the pictures that I've seen of train wrecks the cars stay reletivly intact if a boxcar is knocked off the tracks however the load inside will shift and sometimes the sides of the car will be bowed out for the load hitting it. this is probably best done with a soldering iron getting the plastic warm enough (don't touch the iron to the plastic! Just run ti next to it) until you can flex and bend the plastic by hand.
Thanks for that tip on using the thread. I took a piece of plastic of the same thing and drew some "fine" lines on it using a ruler and proceeded to cut with thread. It took about 20 strokes and made a perfect cut out line. I cut out two doors already using this method and it looks B-E-A-UTIFUL! Thanks much. As for the roof's of the box cars as I was saying, if you see some that have derailed and fallen over you will see that the weight of the car landing on itself creats a "hump" in the roof. I've sense many cars like this. Now on to the flat spots! 
JimI'll try to. We just got a new camera off ebay and it takes much better pictures than our webcam. I'm leaving out to make a run to Dallas,TX in the morning and I'll be back sometime tomorrow night. I'm going to take the locomotive with me to work on it in the truck while we wait for our trailer to get loaded. I do have the box car's weathered. I'm not to happy with how they look because this is my first time at weathering. The grab irons and other details on the cars that weren't damaged I went ahead and hand damaged myself for the added effect.
bending plastic
I remember from way back when I was a kid building Tamiya military models that by dipping the parts in hot water you could bend them. I subsequently wrecked a Merkava tank body by putting it in contact with boiling water.
This same technique could be CAREFULLY applied. If you coupled the water-heating's smooth and stretching disfigurement with some carefully applied cuts and punches you could have some pretty disastrous results, essentially creating a flattened car or a partial debris field.
worse comes to worse, you break out the sledgehammer.
I remember from way back when I was a kid building Tamiya military models that by dipping the parts in hot water you could bend them. I subsequently wrecked a Merkava tank body by putting it in contact with boiling water.
This same technique could be CAREFULLY applied. If you coupled the water-heating's smooth and stretching disfigurement with some carefully applied cuts and punches you could have some pretty disastrous results, essentially creating a flattened car or a partial debris field.
worse comes to worse, you break out the sledgehammer.
LMAO. I thought about that last part real hard. I tried the boiling water trick one time because I was told about it by many people but I came home and threw t around in my mind for a couple days and decided to give it a try. I was told if you need a figure (person) to fit something when it doesn't just dip it in boiling water and bent the arms and legs to the desired results. Well I gave it a try and I was having a hard time with it. It would cool to fast before I could bend anything or it melted to fast and cooled to fast again causeing the arm's and legs to break in two. I'm going to find an old car to experiment with now. I'm gonna give this another try.
