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andrechapelon; Your reference to the Jim Boyd article out of the September, 1967 MR was titled "Lagged Boilers are Easier" I was thinking that it was an RMC article but you are probably correct.  I have the issue but it is currently on vacation in a box while I do some sorting and reorganizing.  Whereever it was published the date is at least in the ball park. I remember this article very clearly and I am sure that he lagged his boiler with either .005 or .008 brass, both of which are commercially available. That article has always intrigued me and I have read it through at least twice; if I remember correctly it appeared shortly before I rotated from the Phillipines which was in September, 1967; when I got settled into my new assignment at Norton Air Force Patch at San Bernardino, Calif and I took inventory of where I was at I concluded that I wasn't going to be able to build a layout and so I spent the better part of the next ten years building die-cast locomotive kits. As I related above, I have read and reread that Jim Boyd article and I have been giving it considerable thought of late; he doesn't paint any pie-in-the-sky pictures in his article; rather he outlines a rational process for constructing a boiler using readily available brass materials.  I am in N-Scale but I don't think that scratchbuilding is necessarily out of the question in that scale and just as soon as I can locate and fish this magazine out of its temporary domicile and refresh my memory I'm going to start doing some serious planning towards getting started doing me some N-Scale scratchbuilding.  I have concluded that if I am ever going to have a stable of iron horses (read: steam locomotives) I'm going to have to figure out a way to build them myself.   All I can do is go flat on my face and I got as ugly as I am from landing there many, many times in the past; one more time ain't gonna make me any uglier. I would reference two more articles in the lets-figure-out-how-to-save-some-money spirit of your post. Sometime towards mid-year, 1970 MR published a rather "strange" article by an American prototype modeler from South Africa.  This individual had constructed (smoothside) passenger carbodies from "paper"; what was unique was that his "paper" was none other than tissue paper (Kleenex(R), Puffs(R), etc) soaked in Elmer's(R) white glue draped over a hardwood form which had been filed to shape and greased to prevent the white glue from adhering to it.  A lot of people don't realize that white glue is, in reality, a plastic. These cars were extremely light weight, relatively strong, and incredibly inexpensive; they were not, however, waterproof.  I am more into flute-sided passenger cars but here is another article which deserves republishing because it uses common inexpensive materials and the outlay for tools is absolutely minimal. Lastly there was an article in the April, 1971 RMC by a rail from Kaycee dealing with his procedures scratchbuilding (smoothsided) passenger cars in N-Scale.  Now, before you HO-Scalers fly off into the vast world of indifference this rail's procedures would be applicable to any scale; the quantities of tools involved is minimal and it uses relatively inexpensive materials.  In addition to passenger cars he had also used the same procedures building an SW1, a locomotive which was not available then and has never been available in N-Scale.  I would like to see RMC re-publish this article for the benefit of newer modelers, particularly those on a restricted budget - or just trying to save some money in general. I stated in an earlier post on this topic that I would "continue to pay for this hobby" because I have been at it for so long that I really have no desire to go anywhere else; I may not necessarily go "out-of-the-box-ready-to-run" but I am going to go somewhere. cnj831; MORE!!! MORE!!! SHOW US MORE!!!  I drooled all over the front of my shirt looking at your photograph; my wife told me I should change my screen name to "needsabib"!!!
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