Several years ago, prior to Accucraft entering the 1/20.3 scale coach market, there was a lengthy discussion on how to produce a suitable scale sized coach and combine. My suggestion was to produce lengths of coach siding from the window line (belt rail?) down and a set of window frames with separate spacer siding pieces to space out the windows to suit various window spacing situations. My original intention was that the window frames would fit in a slot in the top edge of the belt rail on the lower coach siding. This way a coach side could be easily fabricated by selecting the required windows and window pacers and simply gluing in the matching slot in the belt rail. A coach side could be tailored to suit and finished off with moulded coach ends. Well, I do not have the facility to manufacture these mouldings, but my method is relatively simple and has little wastage of the donor car body. My original thought was to ‘sacrifice’ a car body by cutting the car side at the window line with a Dremel and then wasting the rest of the car side. Correspondingly, another body would be attacked supplying the required part that would have been damaged on the donor car sacrificed in the first instance. My thoughts then turned to my original idea with the variable window spacing and fixed length lower car side below the belt rail. Refer attached photograph. Using a sharp hobby knife, I was able to easily separate out the window section at the top edge of the belt rail. This process requires almost no edge cleanup as it is a clean cut, so no variation in car finished height. The removed window frame section is then cut to produce the required window sections and window spacers and reglued to the lower car side. My ‘research’ into the S.R. & R.L. R.R. has resulted in many cars that had various window spacing, as does several of the D. & R.G.W. and C&S cars. This method should give an easy method of making a car side that matches the prototype car, without the labourious method of multiple vertical cuts through the car body side, which is the method that I have used to date. Of cause, the board spacing above and below the beltrail would not match, but I do not think that this is essential or even prototypical. On a typical car side there would be only one vertical join to make in the car body, below the belt rail, assuming one was making a car side longer than the original B’mann Big Hauler body length. Quite often, the window framing was fitted with battens that could disguise the glued join if it was not a clean cut. I hope to make several of the Sandy River cars and with their multiple window spacing, using my normal method, would have wasted several cars, per completed body to get the required parts and resulted in numerous vertical joins in the body side, which no matter how neat a join is made, is still difficult to disguise.
