Gantry Crane magnet pickup loads

I don't know about later versions, but my Pre War 165 came with steel blanks. This is NOT my photo, as my crane is currently on the work bench of Joe Fermani.

American Flyer  s-gauge track ties.  

Cheers, Dave

Clever ideas, I have seen videos showing standard objects being lifted from flat cars and gondola cars, they must have been custom mods. Thanks

A common hack is the good old metal thumb tack.

-Greg

I use mine to remove culverts from Lionel’s culvert car.

Another hack is to take a plastic wooden-style barrel (made by a  lot of different o-scale manufacturers) and CA glue a metal washer to one end. Then paint the whole thing a metallic, rusty color. A bunch of them looks good in a gondola.

I also use cheap, medium to large link chain (about 6"-8" long sections) painted a rusty color for gondola loads that can be lifted via a magnetic crane.   

I just remembered, another thing I’ve done is glue a steel washer in the “hatch” on a Lionel cement container, and remove those from the gondola or to load them.

Thank you all the comments are helpful. With regard to tanks, I see Lionel and MTH made tanks for gondola cars, is either one easier to modify for the magnetic crane? Are they all open bottoms?

I punched out steel disks and glued them to these containers.

Pete

I received the Lionel 282 Portal gantry Crane probably from 1956/1957 as a Christmas present as a kid I loaded/unloaded AC Gilbert erector set lattice trusses into the Lionel gondola cars. I recently rewired the dry rotted conductor control cable with a new cable and everything is working as it did so many years ago, steel loads for the magnet are GarGraves  tin plate track drops that came from fitting curved tracks.   

How about  Mercury capsules or sections of track shown in the truck?

Charlie

I've seen videos of Lionel cranes loading and unloading random scrap metal, culverts, oil drums (from the oil drum loader), and anything else you can imagine.

I unload culverts