HO Scale High Side 2 Bay Gondola

26' stubby gondola in the spirit of the G-39 ore jenny
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updated April 26, 2022

Description

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I've been tinkering around looking for the just-right ore car for a quarry/mine scenario and this is one of the candidates. I took the cutting torch to a 5-bay gondola and made a bunch of other adjustments to get to this stubby little bugger. It is my intention to cast some partial coal loads out of soft lead to give them the proper weight as they are obviously too light out of the box.

 They need about 1.3 ounces and I will post something on casting the loads when I do that at some future date. Going to print out a pattern and do a reverse pattern for the lead to create a drop-in weight that'll look like some misc. leftover coal in the bottom of the car, should be pretty cool.

If you're going to pull this together be aware that the truck/coupler setup may be a little different than you're used to. After screwing around with clip on coupler covers and plastic pins for far too long, I've developed my own approach that uses a 3mm countersink head screw for attaching the trucks and a 2mm black panhead screw for attaching the coupler covers. The 3mm screw allows the truck to float around ever so slightly and the coupler box/cover work really well with Kadee whisker couplers.

Assembly is pretty straight forward, but if you have questions please ask. I throw some supports along the jutting sides of the trucks to get super clean prints, everything else prints support-free. 

You'll see in the 3mf files that I print these with a 0.25 nozzle and 0.15 layers to get all the fine detail. These are not models to be in a hurry with if you want them to look good. 

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The author marked this model as their own original creation.

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