Dead-Live loads?

[DRGW Jake]

Long time lurker turned regular here. (I finally got fed up with the low standards at the trains.com forums.)

Just a random thought, does anyone here think it would be possible to glue together scale coal into a preformed clump? Like, say you do a hack job on a tender that includes cutting the coal bunker to a shorter length. Instead of cutting the (bad looking) plastic coal load, why not glue a styrene sheet into the coal bunker to be the bottom of the bunker. (which, if deep/wide/long enough can have a speaker mounted in it) Then make a styrene mold, for lack of a better word, that you can pour scale coal into, (and here is the part I'm not sure of!) pour in some diluted white glue to glue the coal together into a clump that fits into the bunker. All the look of a live load, with a one step cleanup in the case of a derailment. In essence, it is a dead live load!

/Ramble
--Jake

[bnsf971]

I've done something similar, just put glue over the factory load, and sprinkle coal on it.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

Oh yeah, been doing this for years, just make your regular loads removable. I usually use some plastic wrap in there while gluing stuff in, so it doesn't set to the car side.

[DRGW Jake]

^Good to know that it works! Though for the size of tenders for the 2-10-2s I would be using, I would need to make a mold like I said above. The only place in the tender to put the speaker would be the coal bunker, and I would need it so that 1) Coal doesn't touch the speaker and distort the sound, and 2) so I don't get glue on the speaker during the molding process. Plus I can just make 2 or 3 in advance and drop them in once I finish the chop job.

[bnsf971]

^Good to know that it works! Though for the size of tenders for the 2-10-2s I would be using, I would need to make a mold like I said above. The only place in the tender to put the speaker would be the coal bunker, and I would need it so that 1) Coal doesn't touch the speaker and distort the sound, and 2) so I don't get glue on the speaker during the molding process. Plus I can just make 2 or 3 in advance and drop them in once I finish the chop job.

You could glue in a piece of cardstock where the coal was, and glue the replacement coal to it. That way the coal you put in will never have a chance to touch the speaker.

[Subwayaz]

I have used Styrene as a base for actual Copper before and it seems to work well and look much better; same with small metal scarps from the junk yard; just glue them down to the styrene.
Just trying to keep it real

[wm3798]

I put a piece of dark gray or black foam rubber in, cut the top to shape, and then glue the coal dust to the top of it.  The foam rubber is more pourous, and will not dampen the sound like a solid piece of styrene.

On a Bachmann K-4 I did, I cut a hole in the plastic coal load directly over the speaker mount, then glued a piece of 1/4" foam rubber into the hole.  Then went back over the whole coal load with a thin film of white glue and the coal dust.  Looks seamless, and the sound is better than it would have been enclosed in the tender.

Lee