Alas 40' Woodside Refrigerator car with warped floor-any solution?

If it is die cast you might be able to straighten it by clamping it between two boards with several clamps. Apparently the secret is not to apply to much pressure at once but slowly tighten the clamps over several days.

The first problem is how to remove the floor from the plastic car body without damage. It may be wedged against the body edges.

The thing to do now is get the floor out of the car body before it get damaged !!! Probably Zinc rot nothing you can do. It will only get worse. Ask Atlas for a new floor or make a new one, salvaging the detail parts.

Yep Zinc rot. Had it happen to a car also. 

Do a search on this forum for zinc rot or zinc pest. There are plenty of stories over the years. Short summary: It is the slow degradation of a diecast zinc alloy casting caused by impurities introduced into the molten mix and/or improper manufacturing techniques.

Here’s another reference:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_pest

Bottom line: You can’t straighten the floor. It’s warped because it was trying to expand but was limited by the car body. If you don’t remove it now, it will continue to push outward on the plastic body, likely breaking it.

The zinc casting will eventually crumble completely.

Ask Atlas for a whole new car. Not just a floor.

jim sutter posted:

Ask Atlas for a whole new car. Not just a floor.

Or - if you have no luck there (I'm not sure about the age of this car and its "use by" date), you could just fix it. Some satisfaction there, often.

I fixed one of their pested-out troop cars with a piece of basswood (which comes in a thickness almost the same as the troop car's floor, as a step in the right direction) and the salvaged details from the original floor, as someone mentioned above. Looks fine. Of course, I'm from the "if you can't see it, why model it" school of thought; I don't really care about details visible only after you turn it over. Fairly easy job; you will have to fiddle with it a bit, but it's not major engineering.

It will weigh less; add weight inside: lead and/or large washers from the hardware store, secured with Goo or the like.

It's not an easy job, but doable....

If you have a car with an identical good floor, you can cast your own replacement in resin after making a mold from the good floor.  I know it can be done....an associate (LHS) and myself did this in response to the notorious Weaver zinc pest debacle on their last run of troop cars.

You'll have to carefully remove ALL the added details from the good floor, leaving the floor, alone.  Set it up firmly on a flat surface with a shallow dam (Lego blocks work well!) around the periphery.  We used a light spray of mold release over the prepared floor.  Pour the RTV mold compound.  Let it set up.

Then, keeping the mold flat, pour the resin.  We used a compound that has a slightly thinner consistency and a bit longer work time to ensure details in the mold get a complete fill.

Now then, due to unavoidable shrinkage of poured resins, your floor molding will be a tad shorter than the original casting.  In which case you may need to cut the floor at one or more appropriate places and attach splices to the inside to 'stretch' it back to full length.  The pin locations of some of your longest detail parts to be reattached will dictate where the best cut point(s) might be.

Need more weight to compensate for the difference between zinc and resin??...simply glue it to the inner side of the floor...preferably near/over the truck bolster position.

Like I said, we proved it could be done.  We were going to make the resin castings available to those troop carrier owners so affected.....but then Atlas came to the rescue.

So, coming full circle, start with the good folks at Atlas and see if they have a 'balm in Gilead'.  If not, we can talk further.

FWIW....

KD