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Did Anyone Not Use The Roof That Came With The Walthers Roundhouse?

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  • Member since
    July 2006
  • From: 4610 Metre's North of the Fortyninth on the left coast of Canada
  • 9,230 posts
Did Anyone Not Use The Roof That Came With The Walthers Roundhouse?
Posted by BATMAN on Friday, September 7, 2018 7:12 PM

I have the Walthers RH and don't like the roof that came with it. I think I will make a solid roof so it doesn't have the seams in it. Or if I use it, cover it to give it a proper tar paper look.

I also want to be able to put it on and off in one piece as it will make the light project easier. 

I would like to hear from those that did something different with the roof and anything else as far as the RH goes.Cowboy

Brent

"All of the world's problems are the result of the difference between how we think and how the world works."

  • Member since
    January 2004
  • From: Canada, eh?
  • 13,375 posts
Posted by doctorwayne on Friday, September 7, 2018 9:21 PM

This might be of little or no use to you, Brent, as my roundhouse is not from Walthers.  Instead, it's from Korber, and, in my opinion, likely a bit less refined than than most kits from Walthers.
It's walls are resin castings, with plastic doors and windows.  The framing is stripwood, and the roof is heavy cardstock.  It came with a packet of ballast, to be applied to the roof as if it were tar and gravel, in a sorta salt'n'pepper appearance.

I'm not a big fan of most resin kits, and as this is an older kit, it wasn't one to change that opinion.  The only way I could assemble the walls was to use a combination of screws and JB Weld, and I added a one-piece floor of .060" styrene using the same. 
I'm also not especially enamoured with wood as a model building material, so did some of the interior framing using strip styrene...in the photo below, it's simply sitting in place, but will eventually become permanent...

I've shortened four of the stalls, and really shortened the other one - fits better into the limited space available, and is big enough for the locos which will be using it.
The framing scales-out roughly as 12"x12", similar to a prototype with which I'm familiar, but the gusset plates are noticeably oversize - I'm hoping that paint and a roof will minimise that feature.
My plan is to build styrene roof-support trusses to sit atop those posts, and to fit into those gussets.  However, they'll be affixed to the underside of the styrene roof and connected to one another with trusses spanning those tracks.
My hope is that attaching the roof (.060" sheet styrene) to both the longitudinal and lateral trusses will form a fairly rigid and stable structure, which will fit into place snugly, yet still be removable as a unit.

So, since we're in roughly similar situations, perhaps my plan may be of some use to you, either in whole, or as a starter for your own ideas.

I've not had much time to make headway on the roof, but I did manage to at least get the brickwork painted...

...and to start on the turntable, too...

...although I'm not overly pleased with the performance of the latter.

Wayne

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