Workington No 977 @ Paul Bartlett's fotopic site
Realising that I wanted to build a few, I designed a batch of etchings for this wagon back in the early 2000's, using a drawing and batch of photos kindly supplied by Phil Baggley of Workington (although I believe the drawing was published in the Modeller in the 80's.
Construction is fairly straightforward, the main side and wagon floor fold up into a channel, with the top lips along the sides folding down from these as well. Given the state of the wagon in the prototype pic, I didn't use bending bars for these lips, to end up with a slightly wavy, bashed about look. The ends are separate, and are soldered in place from the underside of the buffer beam, and then the joints between sides and ends are seamed.
The completed basic body can be seen in this shot, with the underframe in its flat state. Both the body and the underframe have lots of half-etched rivets which I pressed through with a darning needle.
The underframe folds up like this
and is then soldered in place to the bottom of the wagon floor. This is all hidden, so plenty of solder isn't a problem!
The body reinforcing ribs are then added - these fold up and have push-through rivets so are quite a fiddle to put together.
The ends have double reinforcing ribs (study of prototype pics showed these are not T section but two L sections rivetted back to back
Finally so far, I have added the corner brackets - in this pic they're still attached to the etch as it's much easier to hold them whilst sweating them in place.
Stuff still to be done involves a few other etched details etc, plus brakegear and the bogies (which are Ratio diamond framed ones). However, I'm building three of them at once so it might be a while until the next update.
Also in the pipeline is a little experiment with rapid prototyping - this wagon body is for an internal user from Ravenscraig (based on a picture in the IRS Industrial Wagons book) and has been produced by rapid prototyping from my CAD model. It will sit on one of the Gibson 10' etched underframes. OK, so rapid prototyping is a bit of an overkill for a wagon body, but I wanted to test the process out before using it for a locomotive body....
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