Swap Meet Rehabs

For whatever reason, the pickings at last Saturday's Simi Valley swap meet were slim and overpriced. I did find some promising items, including this BN quad hopper built from a 1990s Walthers kit. It was $5. Once I got it home and looked it over more carefully, I thought $5 was just a little much.

The builder for whatever reason had substituted older plain-bearing trucks for the roller-bearing trucks that came with the kit. He'd also screwed up the truck mounts on the bolsters. I scrounged in my junk box for replacement trucks and plugged-redrilled and tapped the bolsters for 2-56 screws. The builder apparently found the door latches in the kit too challenging to assemble, so they weren't with the car.

A big change I make on older cars is to make sure the couplers are replaceable, maintainable, and adjustable, Walthers 1990s kits didn't have screw mounted coupler box covers, so I had to pry the covers off -- they'd been cemented in -- and carefully drill out the center pivot posts #50 and the covers #42, tap the holes in the pivot posts, and reinstall Kadees. The builder for whatever reason had shortened and rebent the Kadee "hoses". Since I operate with Kadee magnets, I had to replace the Kadees with new ones.

Since the BN paint scheme dates from the 1970s, I found a prototype photo on the web that showed the location of the ACI label, which I try to add to all cars that date from the 1968-78 period.

But once I saw it, I noticed that the factory paint left off the conspicuity marks from the lower side of the car. Luckily, I had a Microsale BN freight car set on hand that had these, so I added them. I added Kadee 36 inch wheels with the faces painted Tru Color Rail Brown:

I also weathered the interior with Tru Color Rail Brown, and I also dusted the sides with a mix of a little Tru Color Grimy Black and a lot of Tru Color Flat and lacquer thinner. This toned the white lettering down a little and blended things in.

The other side of the car had some of its lettering either scuffed up at the factory or scraped off as part of normal wear and tear. I finessed this with more of the diluted Grimy Black on that side of the car.

The Walthers quad hoppers fell off the radar for some years, but they've released new versions as Mainline RTR. It looks like they have metal Kadee compatible couplers, new die cast underframes, added detail, metal wheels, and new paint. In the $20 range, I think these are good value for the increased price over the 1990s version.