| HONX 1015 | July, 2010 |
| ©2010 Daniel Cortopassi
| Please do not redistribute without permission. Usage Info |
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Intermountain Canadian Cylindrical Hopper, HONX 1015
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This is an early version of this common Intermountain car that I bought off eBay. This was a ready-to-run car, but was built with a plastic roofwalk and had plastic wheels. Newer Intermountain versions of this car have photo-etched roofwalks and metal wheels.
Since I won't run anything but metal wheels on my track, the first thing I did was to swap out the trucks. Originally I tried using the Intermountain trucks, but these are an older type with pivoting sideframes that tend to derail constantly. I found some more conventional HO trucks in my scrap box and added some semi-scale (thinner tread width) 36 inch metal wheels.
I got rid of the plastic couplers that came with the car in favor of Kadee No. 58s, which fit in the Intermountain coupler boxes. The only problem was that the coupler height was way too high. I ended up removing the coupler boxes, adding some shims to lower them, and then reattaching them to the car. After some trial and error I got everything squared away operationally.
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This is the car with the new wheels and couplers but with the original roofwalk. I have a bunch of these cars with photo-etched roofwalks, and they really do look better, so I decided to change it.
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Fortunately Plano makes a roofwalk kit for this car. It comes with a photo-etched roofwalk and coupler platforms. I opted not to use the coupler platforms since I didn't see a good way to remove the plastic ones on the car. These are much less noticeable anyway.
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Working very carefully with an X-Acto No. 17 blade, I was albe to remove the plastic roofwalk without damaging the fragile supports too badly. I have built some of these cars from kits in the past and I had three extra supports in my scrap box. I used those to replace the ones in the worst shape. Fortunately the others were still intact on the outside where they are most visible, so I left them alone.
The Plano kit includes a small trip of thin styrene to make a shim for the ends of the car, an important step as otherwise the roofwalk will droop over the end ladders. I very carefully made modifications to the ladder areas to accomodate the roofwalk. In the process I destroyed one of the tiny roofwalk end supports, but luckily I had a few of those in my scrap box, too. Before mounting the new roofwalk I brush painted the new supports and the roofwalk bottom a pale gray to match the car. I used an airbrush to spray the top after the roofwalk was glued on. I didn't mask anything, just worked carefully and let the airbrush feather the new gray into the prepainted gray on the car.
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This is the car with the new roofwalk. To me it was definitely worth the effort, and looks much better than the original.
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