I'm thinking about venturing into the area of kitbashing a couple of Con-Cor Budd passenger cars. All I'd like to do is change the window strip on the model. I've never done this before, so I was hoping for a little help! I want to make a Budd dome/lounge/dorm from a dome coach and a 5/6 sleeper from a 10/6 sleeper by removing the window strip area and replacing it with a strip of sheet styrene with the correct window arrangement. I have some plans from the book, "CZ-The Story Of The California Zephyr", which look to be very close to N scale. I'm wondering if anyone has done this before and if so, what thickness of styrene did you use?
This is actually easier to do on the Budd cars (at least for me ) than on the smooth side cars. It is easier to blend the new window belt in between the two corrugated areas. The windows can either be totally replaced or cut and pasted to get the correct spacing again. It is a shame if you have to replace them totally because of they protrude out the opening so they are close to flush and have the raised gasket area.
Sounds like you are doing the same thing I am doing, modeling the CZ. I have added the Conductor's desk window in one of the dome coaches. It was fairly easy, canabalized a window glass from a coach restroom window. The wholesale window rearrangement for the dome,dorm, lounge and the 6/5 sleeper I have not attempted yet, still studying it/planning my attack. The big pain is going to be removing the vestibule doors and hiding the joint in the fluting. The pier panels measure 0.04" thick on my micrometer. If you go to this site, the California Zephyr Virtual Museum: http://calzephyr.railfan.net/ you can download plans of all of the cars and then make copies that you can enlarge/reduce to match N scale dimensions. That is what I did. Concor did us a favor by picking for their coach the CZ 16-section sleeper, after it was converted to a coach. Making a correct interior for the sleeper was fairly easy. Of course wrongway Concor produced a mirror image of the undercarriage for the dome coaches, but that was fairly easy to correct
Thanks, Larry for pointing that out. I hadn't noticed that until your post. I checked my dome car and you're right; the dome/dorm/lounge doesn't have the vestibule. That is a problem! I don't think the other cars will be a problem. Might take me a while to get up the nerve to take a knife to a car though
John, I took a long look at this project a couple of years ago. The conclusion I at which I arrived (other than to take a long nap) was that I would have to start with an undec car, fill several seams with putty, fill errant window openings, and recut new windows without slicing into the shell. Getting windows into the new holes is one problem I never resolved. I put the project aside because I do not have sufficiently wide curves to run those cars. I've thought of doing some bashing on the old Arnold 60 foot cars but have thought better of that.
I don't really have a place to run mine, either. I'm in a NTrak groupe, but that seems to be on hold. I hope to someday (don't we all say that) have the space to build a layout to run my Zephyr. Until then, I guess I'll just keep gathering up equipment.
I was just looking at some Con Cor Budd cars and realized they don't have the raised gasket area around the "flush" windows like I stated above. I guess I was confusing them with the Kato cars and the old ones from Rowa. Anyway I just bought one of the new CC diners that I plan to bash into a "French Qarter" Lounge car for my Sunset Limited. I will get around to it one of these days
Russ, that sounds like me. Too many things I wil "get to some day" I have a WP GP7 waiting to be finished, along with a GP40, a GP35 and a set of F3's, plus my passenger cars. And, I still haven't even planned my layout yet!
