building a 3" scale bobber caboose

[sabin]

Lookin' good Mike, you are WAY ahead of me.
Jim

[Jacob's dad]

Please provide an update on the completion of this car.

Thank you,

Jeff

[Harlock]

Working on roof now. Been busy at work so nothing more to update at the moment.

[Harlock]

Caboose update!

Remember those milled roof slats designed to dovetail into each other? Here they are all fitted up and nice. Further sanding and finishing is done after they are together. The interior has also been painted.

Continued in next post.

[Harlock]

In June the finished wood roof received its canvas top, using painter's canvas and titebond III wood glue. The glue was rolled on and then the canvas quickly laid down, and then ironed. We found that we could easily pull on it and adjust it during the setting period of the glue. The biggest worry was it deforming later. But with the iron and a lot of general smoothing out, it stayed put and glued on flat, no wrinkles. Slits were cut in the loose ends to help it wrap. It goes well with two people to put it on, otherwise it would be very difficult to impossible to stretch it correctly on such a large scale piece.

The hole for the cupola will be cut later with everything sawn all at once.

The last photo is a little joke - with the uncut fabric it looked like a gypsy caravan of old so I went and grabbed the computer mouse rug I use with my laptop, ta-da!

[Harlock]

The other big thing in progress is the handrails and grab irons. Earlier in the year I went to document the real cabeece and took a ton of measurements very quickly on a pad of graph paper. I then came back and translated them into usable drawings. Attached are a couple of examples of assembly drawings, and then my dad's translation of such into actual hardware. The result is beautiful before paint.

To make the fancy shape of the handrails on the ends, my dad had to obtain a nice wire bender and make some custom dies for it. We'll cover this in a video and stills to be made in the next few months.

I had the large U shapes of the ladders water jet cut. Unfortunately they turned out to not quite fit right on the model and are being remade to a different diameter. The roof of the model and the real car diverge a little bit, enough so that they aren't quite large enough. But thanks to a generous local live steamer the parts are being remade on a barter basis. There are two sets of them because Jim Sabin is also making one of these along side of us.

The undercarriage hardware lags behind, I have some refining to do of the pedestals etc. since I got actual measurements. I need to reconcile what I had made earlier before my Colorado trip with what I actually measured, and the other projects have kept me busy.

[KidAmato]

Finally! An update! Tell your dad nice job. Comin' out great.


Best wishes,
Nico A.

[Love4Steam]

Looking fantastic! Are you going to detail the interior as well? Thanks for the kind words. Hope to get them to you soon!

Doug

[Harlock]

Looking fantastic! Are you going to detail the interior as well? Thanks for the kind words. Hope to get them to you soon!

Doug

The interior may get detailed later, we have no plans to do it in the near future.

-Mike

[mjahn]

Aww man, I wish I was half as good at finished carpentry as the work you're doing mike!

[Harlock]

It's time for another update on the caboose.

After some of the other detail was placed on the ends, it was time to start thinking about the coupler release bracketry and the brake wheel and rachet and pawl.

Since we selectively scaled the caboose to be a little narrower to match the boxcar and locomotive, that shrunk the grabrails somewhat, but we did not scale the ladder. This meant the hand brake wheel had to get smaller, so I printed another version of it slightly scaled down. This seemed to have done the trick.

The coupler release lever uses two cast brackets, one at the center and one out at the side. Fortunately the Farmer Brothers, who are restoring the full size #1008 caboose brought loaned examples of these couplers to the Narrow Gauge Convention and I got some good photos there, and some basic dimensions sent over later.

I built up 3D models of them and had them printed in stainless at shapeways. Since they will be functional they are metal. The surface roughness disappears with primer and paint.

In addition, here is a picture of the brakewheel and the marker lamp holders that are mounted on the corners of the caboose. Those items are printed in the high strength flexible plastic. So far on my boxcar I've had zero trouble with the plastic.

There is a photo here of the 3D rachet and pawl compared to the original, but I do not have an individual photo of the finished RP parts at this time, but you can see them in the last image on the caboose.

All of these parts went to my dad who had the large task of painting and adapting them to the car, fabricating the rest of the coupler release rigging and lever.

in the last photo, the mostly finished end of the caboose. Note the dog leg that the coupler release bracket has to do around the rachet. The real life caboose is full of things like that due to the limited space and generic full sized hardware the C&S used on the car. It's all oversize on the tiny caboose, giving it a certain charm.

In the next post I will talk about the Cupola.

[Harlock]

The next part of this adventure concerns the cupola. Now that the main body hardware is basically done, the only thing left above the floor is the cupola. This presented some problems due to the lack of big picture detail on the maxwell drawing, missing dimensions etc because the cupola is hard to access - John Maxwell likely did not crawl on the roof either as it was likely too fragile.

In the previous post, I mentioned that there are two brothers, Richard and Bob Farmer, who are restoring C&S caboose #1008. This is an interesting tale in and of itself. Once again, like the boxcar build, this project has taken me halfway across the united states and allowed me to meet some really fantastic people I may not have otherwise bumped into.

A few years ago, Richard Farmer, a long time LALS member, found out about a caboose being used as a shed a few miles from his San Fernando Valley home. The new owners of the property wanted it out. It was in horrible shape, devoid of all hardware and undercarriage and slowly rotting away. but once it was determined that it was a previously unknown C&S bobber caboose survivor, it was decided to make every attempt to save it. It had somehow made its way all the way from Colorado out to California in the intervening years after the C&S sold off their inventory long, long ago.

Richard and Bob moved it to the backyard of Richard's home and slowly began documenting, stabilizing and dismantling it. Their own search for replacement materials and help took them far and wide to used antique wood dealers, restoration specialists and museum curators. They are now in the throes of a many-year project to bring the 1008 back to operating condition. This fall, the brothers gave a clinic at the Narrow Gauge Convention, which was held in Pasadena. Jim and I finally got to meet them there, and exchanged contact info.

This turned out to be invaluable because they have performed an exhaustive research of all the C&S bobber cabeece and turned up a lot of information, hardware and what-not. All of the bobbers are slightly different, but the #1008 and #1005 are different further still. They have rounded corners from a passenger car, the brake cylinder is on the opposite side, the cupolas are a little different, etc. etc etc. When dismantling the car, they found notches in the top of the body sides for a center cupola. The rest of the C&S bobbers were converted from DSP&P waycars, which had no cupolas originally. Going back to UP shops records, they found that these two were likely built for the Narrow Gauge Utah Northern, and then purchased by the C&S later. At the Utah Northern they had center cupolas. All of the bobbers, both Utah Northern and DSP&P, were built by the Union Pacific Shops (prior to the UP's involvement in the C&S). They were modified into the bobbers you see today by the C&S themselves.

At the Narrow Gauge Convention, they brought the beginnings of the restored cupola frame. Later I decided to contact Richard to come over and throughly measure it, as there was not enough information on the drawings we have. I went to Richard's house, which is less than an hour and a half from mine, and we spent a wonderful day BSing and going over the project, and I did get some measuring time in to get what I needed. Here are some pictures of the NG clinic and the partially dismantled caboose at Richard's.