Flat car loads

Very nice effort. Really like your cribbing! Is that a K-Line MLR caboose we just see peeking in the last pic?

Two of mine:

Note that the cribbing has been replaced/completed since this photo was taken.

This is an ebay purchase that totally surprised me upon getting it out of the box:

Note that the "motor" load is plastic (and much newer than the flat) and the armature spins but with a bit of mechanical resistance. I though that it was the All Nation cast Al flat; well, it is the AN flat, but it is a very early one of cast bronze:

No underweight tracking problems here!

Some of my military flats:

@Mark V. Spadaro posted:

Very nice effort. Really like your cribbing! Is that a K-Line MLR caboose we just see peeking in the last pic?

Indeed it is, good eye!  Currently my favorite caboose.  I haven't added a diode to prevent it from self destructing, so no smoke for now.

@PRRMP54 posted:

Two of mine:

Note that the cribbing has been replaced/completed since this photo was taken.

This is an ebay purchase that totally surprised me upon getting it out of the box:

Note that the "motor" load is plastic (and much newer than the flat) and the armature spins but with a bit of mechanical resistance. I though that it was the All Nation cast Al flat; well, it is the AN flat, but it is a very early one of cast bronze:

No underweight tracking problems here!

Wow, this looks heavier than my steam loco :-). Nice find!

@PRRMP54 posted:

Two of mine:

A little history about this unique load, that if you did not know, is the armature from a dynamotor, a unit that took low DC voltage like 6, 12, or more commonly 28 for aircraft equipment, and made high voltage out of it.  Most made around 260VDC, but many could do multiple voltages like 450 and 700 out of one and it would have a third commutator, and one unit made 1000VDC at 500MA for a WW II BC375 transmitter.  The US insistence on compatible/interchangeable  parts, made this dynamotor armature by Electrolux, fit motors made by GE, RCA, and other small shops that had military contracts back then.  The 4 brushes on the commutators would last a very long time on ground based equipment, but when airborne, especially at 4 engine bomber altitudes, they burnt out quickly due to the unpressurized planes low barometric pressure allowed heavy arcing on the commutator. Vibrator power supplies existed before and after WW II primarily in  electron tube car radios and other tube electronics that needed high voltage for the tube plates where 12VDC would not do it.  The mechanical vibrator running in the 60-120 cycle rate, the higher frequency requiring a different transformer designed for the higher rate, became replaced by one of the earliest large scale uses of transistors, in the transistor based DC radio supply.  The transistors for AC/DC radios that had a power transformer were oscillating  at a 60 cycle rate had to match the AC line freq. to make primary winding AC voltage for a transformer when running off a car battery.  One thing the mechanical vibrator could do, that transistors could not, if the unit had a synchronous vibrator which had 2 to 4  sets of contacts, it maintained the output phase of the secondary on the transformer, and you did not need rectifiers, just filters  one set of vibrator contacts switching the DC on the primary to make AC, the others switching the secondary output to the filters, keeping only a positive going waveform into the filters.    If you had a tube CB set, or just about any device that ran off of 110, but could also run on 12VDC in the '60's, just about every model had 2 large transistors on the back panel which made AC out of DC.