Got a new USA Centerbeam car , and after adding metal trucks and KaDee 907’s I was going to make it an empty with cables strung like it was required , but with some time to kill I started cutting craft sticks, and made 24 units of lumber, one craft stick wide. The units are close to 8’ and 10’ scale lengths. Sliced a couple of sticks thin to add as stickers on bottom of the units each unit is 11 sticks tall so 3 high fills the car pretty good. BTW that’s 296 sticks on the load.
Then cut a couple of pieces of 1” blue hard foam as a spacer and another smaller piece to fill the rest of the gap.
Glue the units in an orderly fashion after painting the blue foam to hide it from showing in the gaps.
Next a trip to Hobby Lobby to get some wire to make cables to secure the load. A $10 roll of 30 ft is plenty , and the jewelry department has little clamping rings to secure the cable together. A couple of hours with needle nose pliers pulling and trimming the wires I was almost done.
All cable have corner irons to keep the cable from digging into the edges , so I had some old credit cards and using scissors and a razor knife I cut some pieces that look about the right size , bent them in a corner shape glued them to the load and the wire and the car is now ready for fall/ winter in Arizona enjoy the pictures
Oh yeah forget to add that a green Sharpie and a straight edge I added the green “banding” that hold the units of lumber and also holds the stickers to the units . Also 4 craft sticks per unit on top give the illusion the whole load is there. Someone on Facebook asked and I did weigh the car and it adds just about 1 lb weight to right at 3 lbs from 2.03 lbs