I'm not sure if this is the right forum to post this question or not, but here goes. Does anyone know or have an educated guess on what the width of a weld bead on the side sheets of a 40 or 50 ft boxcar of the 40's and 50's era? It's for a boxcar scratch building project and I would like to try and get the bead line as close to proto as possible.
Thanks.
Chester
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In O scale? You really think you're going to be able to see a difference between, say, a 1/4" bead and a 1/2" bead?
Errrrrr...When you put it that way, no.
My plans are to use the weld beading by Archer to represent the weld lines on the car side. As these welds are arc weldings, they aren't that wide, so to properly represent the weld line it should be as thin as possible on the model. The thinnest Archer makes is .015 which converts to .75 in O scale inches.
Now I model in Proto48, which means the model is built to exact standards. This means that I must represent the width of the weld at about .005 which would be .25 wide. I know it sounds really picky, but if you look at a b&w photo of a 50's era welded boxcar, you can barely see the actual weld line. This is the effect that I am looking to achieve. Now the difference between .005 and .015 can be seen with the unaided eye. That's just the way I am.
Chester
I'd measure one on the boxcars at my museum, but I'm not going to be down there until later this week.
Thanks Steve. When ever you an. I'm in no hurry.
Chester
OK Chester...First off, I wonder why you think 40 or 50 foot boxcars in the 1940s or 50s were welded?
I say this because, as I wandered our museum grounds yesterday at the New Hope Valley Railway, inspecting our two 1940s-era 40 foot boxcars, our steel cabooses, our WWII era diesels, our heavyweight RPO and WWII troop transport and our various and sundry other equipment, I could not locate a single welded panel. Everything was riveted!
However, I did locate a couple of weld seams--these being the welded-on ends of our steam locomotive water tank car of the 10,000 gallon variety--and those welds were consistently between 3/4" and 1" in width.
Well for one, the Pullman-Standard boxcars were all welded side cars 40' and 50'. If you happen to have a Lionel 40' or an Atlas 50', you will see no rivets at the panel seams. From what I've read, welding as we know it today came from the war effort. It was after the war that welding came into vogue. ACF cars where also coming welded also.
Chester
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