New Haven Deluxe Diner part 3

Mounting the car sides to the chassis

All Branchline Trains passenger cars that I have assembled the base chassis has an end-to-end warp out of the box. Snapping the Branchline car sides onto the chassis by placing the car side locating pins into the corresponding holes in the chassis will straighten out the chassis warp and properly locate the sides to the chassis. The BCW diner car sides are flat on the interior side therefore lacking a method to locate the sides to the chassis and straighten out the end-to-end chassis warp. The following method worked well to locate the car side height in relation to the chassis and straighten out the warp.

First step is to locate the car side height in relation to the chassis by gluing a styrene strip to the interior of the car side extending from end-to-end to fit between the mounting locations for the vestibule bulkhead supports on the Branchline chassis. The bottom edge of these styrene strips will rest against the top edge of the Branchline chassis fixing the height of the car sides in relation to the chassis. 

A dimension of .290" between the bottom of the car side and the bottom edge of the styrene strip worked well for this kit. Three jigs equal to the .290" dimension were made, placing the bottom edge of the car side and the jigs against a straight edge use the opposite edge of the jigs to locate and glue the styrene strips in place.

Next step is to attach two styrene blocks to each interior end of the of the car sides. These two blocks will pinch the chassis ends between them and acting in conjunction with the styrene strip attached in the first step will nearly allow the car sides snap onto the chassis depending on how tight the pinch between the two blocks is.

The larger block is glued even with the car end and will aid later as a gluing surface when attaching the car ends. The smaller block at the bottom is cut to a length shorter than the width of the place where the vestibule steps of an original Branchline kit would have been attached. This block is glued in the center of the place for the steps, because this block is shorter than the opening this will allow for some minor side-to-side adjustment of the car sides in relation to the chassis during final assembly if needed.

The combination of these blocks and styrene strip also completely eliminate the chassis warp.