Timeframe on a detail part

[FRRYKid]

I happened to be looking on Walthers' website this morning and found an interesting new detail part: 949-4130

My question on it is this: I know that in modern times (late 80s to the present) that this would be accurate from seed to other baggged agricultural goods (oyster shell, wood bedding, etc. Growing up on a farm/ranch I got a lot of knowledge on that point), but would this idea have been proper for the 70s to early 80s? As I have a team track area, this would be a idea for more detail for the area.

As usual, thank you in advance for any assistance the forums can provide.

[JWhite]

Cement and other goods have been sold in bags for decades.  I'm not sure when the transition was made from fabric and paper bags to the plastic coated ones that look like the one's modeled in your detail part, but it seems to me like a little paint and you could make the bags look right for whatever era you are modeling.

[DSchmitt]

JWhite

Cement and other goods have been sold in bags for decades

My dad and I used baged (paper) cement when we built a sidewalk in the early 1960's.

[chutton01]

Cement sold in reinfornced paper bags (sacks) at home centers is quite common today. Plastic sacks are common as well, but paper is probably a much safer bet for the early 1980s era. Problem is, most paper sacks tend to have a longer, flatter shape than the more "puffy" ones Walthers's has modeled (well, most plastic sacks are rather flat too). I guess garden supplies like Mulch or Peat Moss may be 'puffier' like the Walthers models.

Here is an image of a pallet loaded with mortar mix in 25kg plastic bags. Looking at the bags closely (plus many other on-line images), you can see the bigger weakness of the Walthers details - the seams on prototype bags are only at the ends, not the bags' sides like the Walthers bags. If I remember my How-Its-Made episodes correctly, such bags are generally produced as long plastic tubes, which are then cut to size, sealed on one end (producing one end seam), filled with product, and then sealed on the other (the other end seam) - NO seams on the sides.

I'm presuming the seams on the model bags are due to the molding process, but to replicate the most common bags I've seen (IRL and on-line) they would need to be scraped/sanded off (you'd most likely want to repaint the bags anyway).

For what it's worth, I have a Presier warehouse figure who is posed holding a sack for eternity (poor fellow), so I made a few more 'paper' sacks out of thick styrene (filed & shaped ends), painted all the sacks in Sakrete brand colors (white w/ yellow sides), added Sakrete labels, and posed him loading the sacks into a small cart (alas, it is a medium distance detail, as this was before I learned that the Testors's Decal Paper which I used to make the Sakrete labels bleeds ink if you look at it funny).