Paul Doggett sent a message recently from his home in the UK. He detailed his build of the new HO scale Southern Pacific flat car kit. Here’s Paul with notes and photos.
This is not an easy one to write as the Owl Mountain Models F-50-10 flat car kit is such a good kit to build. The model parts came together easily and assembly took about four to five hours.
Basic tools were most useful to assemble this model. A good sprue cutter, emery boards or sanding sticks, and liquid plastic cement was my adhesive of choice. A 2-56 tap would be useful to tap for truck and coupler screws. I used a British 10BA tap.
You get everything you need to build a good looking car, the only things I added were uncoupling levers and brake hoses. l replaced the plastic wheels provided with Kadee wheelsets.
An eight page instruction sheet is provided. It is very well written and has plenty of illustrations of where to fit the parts. Building the car is as easy as 1-2-3 as you follow what are some of the best written instructions I have ever seen.
To help with the very small decals, Owl Mountain provides a printout of the decals with the kits. This is very useful as some of the decals are extremely small and difficult to se on the decal sheet.
I did rough up the deck and painted it a mix of shades of grey not quite fifty but a few. According to Tony Thompson’s blog the SP never replaced the complete decks.
Lead weights fit into a box built into the car underframe. This is a very clever way to add weight to what would otherwise be a very lightweight car.
After the initial assembly, another few hours dedicated to painting, decaling , and weathering made this model ready for service on my model railroad.
We thank Paul Doggett for sharing his experiences in building the new Owl Mountain Models flat car kit.
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Looks great, Paul. I have 4 reserved
Nice. I just built a SP version and was wanting to do a PE version, but there doesn’t seem to be any instructions or info on how to do the brake rigging for it.
I noticed that you write the date, car number, etc on the assy instructions. I just started doing that after misnumbering a car and putting the wrong trucks on another.
Nice job on assembling and painting. Looks like a nice kit and will have to get one from the second run.