Walthers NJT Comet II

I am going to run it through my table jig saw. One pass on each side of the bolsters. Then I'll glue it back together. This will give me something a little narrower to where I can extend down the sides of the shell. Mounting the shell to the frame will be easy, but I need to build up the bottom fillet. The whole problem is that the car is missing its bottom six inches. It's also about six inches short off prototype length, but that's easily corrected by chopping the underframe in half and gluing it back together.

My whole plan is based on using the saw kerf to make parts narrower. Back in the dark ages, people had to do this with Athearn wide-body shells...

Frame was sized to the Walthers body. Shell is thicker because it's resin, not styrene.

Solution? Make the frame narrower. I set up a fence on a scroll saw to make a cut on I learned the hard way that I needed to oil the blade with light machine oil because the dry blade welded the frame together as fast as I cut it. Using the oil, however did the trick.





I should mention that I added a center sill before starting, just like I did to the Comet II cars. I set the frame on an aluminum plate to glue it back together using MEK. Cutting and gluing once didn't reduce the width enough, so I reset my fence and cut it a second time on both sides to make it narrower again. I just ran the blade down the original cuts. Once happy with the width, I glued a solid piece of 0.080 styrene the length of the underframe to strengthen it.

I already cut off everything below the body line and saved the four corner pieces, so the next step was to try mounting the underframe to the IMW shell. I found the center of the underframe and the center of the shell, marking each with a scribe mark. I taped the frame to the shell so that I could drill through the frame into the shell's precast mounting blocks, then tapped those holes for 2-56 screws. I pulled the screws out of a lifetime supply I bought off ebay direct from China for less than hobby manufacturers want for a six-pack.



Bolster height needed a little tweaking, but mechanically I now have a runnable Comet I car The height looks good next to the Comet II cars, so now I can move on to adding the missing body height and rebuilding the lower doors.





Sadly, getting this far with that dang IMW kit requires sacrificing a Walthers Comet II or Horizon car. I may yet build a decent model out of this thing.

And for those waiting for an update on the Comet II part of this project, I will begin working on an etching for the cab car door windows so that they will have the correct sliding doors.

Been a long time, and no updates for ages due to the Photobucket joke. But armed with my new Pbase account, here's the finished equipment. I did meet my goal of finishing them before Rapido released its model, just so people know this isn't the Rapido.

First, I extended the sides of the Comet I to make it ride at the correct height, and did a partial modification of the suspension to make it look less like a Comet II, even if it doesn't match a Comet I.





All cars were painted with Alclad. Unfortunately, I never should have brought the Solvaset near them, as it damaged the finish and I couldn't repair it. I'm not 100% happy with the cars but they were never intended to be 100% models for me.

Completed Comet II coach:


Cab car with lights. I have headlight and rear marker lights installed, but the dang decoder is nearly impossible to program...




Underside of coach vs. cab car:


Completed Comet I kit from Island Model Works, after waaaaaaay too much rebuilding to make it not suck: