Photo of Wooden Deck on a Flatcar

Overhead photos of wood deck flat cars are hard to come by. Here are links to a few pictures I found on the web.  I won't post them due to copyright policies of the forum.

Photo 1
Photo 2
Photo 3

To simulate a weathered wooden deck, plastic decks can be painted with a base coat of grey, dry brushed with a few shades of brown and grey, then finished with a wash of India ink and alcohol.

Laser cut wood decks have an unnatural grain pattern.  This one below was stained then colors were dry brushed on.  Not a great look.

For this laser cut wood deck, as with the plastic deck, I started with a heavy base coat of grey, dry brushed with a few shades of brown and grey, then finished with a wash of India ink and alcohol.  This hid the grain pattern.

Finally, this non-scale car has a deck made from low quality coffee stirrer sticks.  They were pre-stained with Hunterline light grey stain.  There is a lot of natural color variation due to how much each stick absorbs the stain.  Plus there is warping and splintering of some sticks.  All of this gives the best appearance with a lot less work (dry brushing is very time consuming).  The sticks are cut to length with a NWSL Chopper and glued to the deck with contact cement.

There are many good tutorials on weathering flat cars  (plastic, wood, or laser cut wood) that can be found with a google search.

Bob

Thanks @RRDOC and @Dave_C.  I will certainly use the info from your posts.  I probably won't get the car this is intended to be put on for a couple of weeks yet, so I'll post what the outcome of my project is here.

Thanks again.

As @RRDOC, noted.   With some not too difficult weathering techniques you can do a lot with plastic decked flatcars. 

Here's some photos of an MTH Premier car I did earlier in 2024.  Here are the steps:

1.  I scribed wood grain into the boards with Razor saw, a sharp knife blade, and some really coarse sandpaper (40 grit) With the sharp knife I actually dug into some boards pretty deep to simulate a split broken deck board. 

2. Some paint washes of varying colors, grays, burnt umber making sure to apply it along the length of the boards.

3. Yes a black wash to bring out the separation  between the boards

4. To blend it all together I sparingly applied some Pan Pastels to blend things together.

The decks look great Chris. What looks even better is the ride height. Can you share your method in how you lower them.

@Dave_C posted:

The decks look great Chris. What looks even better is the ride height. Can you share your method in how you lower them.

@Dave_C -  Dave,  I drilled out the plastic top hat where the original truck mounts.  I use fender washers with standard outside diameters that match the set of Forstner Drill bit set I have....   I am attaching 2 photos one from the bottom and one from the top of the frame with the deck removed.   I can't remember if the order that I drilled the holes is critical, I don't think so.....  The head of the truck mounting screw sits down in the washer with the AAA mark on it. 

I set it up on the drill press made the "through hole" a tight fit to a washer that has an ID that fits the shoulder on the MTH truck.  This is the smaller of the two drill bits used, I want to say right at 3/4" ? Large enough to eliminate the top hat stand off.  I am 99% sure I bored this hole first to remove the molded plastic top hat that causes the car to ride too high.

Then I flip the frame over, and used a larger Forstner bit to take off the 4 pie shaped pieces, so that the larger fender washer would sit flush and wouldn't interfere when I remounted the deck floor.  The drill press with a Forstner bit that drills flat bottom holes is a neat way to remove the 4 pie shaped pieces, but leave enough plastic under neath it to glue the fender washer and have a good strong bond... Note, the car frame has to be clamped in vice, or screwed down to a block of wood when doing this, or it won't work.  Forstner bits have a small centering point to keep everything centered and stable.  When doing this it's more like using a plunge router bit, so the piece you're working on will jump if it's not secure when the bit starts cutting.  There is no material at the hole center for the Forstner bit to bite into

I use the thick Gorilla Super Glue to bond everything in place, washer to washer, and washer to plastic MTH frame.   

Sorry for the long winded explanation !  Wish I had taken one more photo, before I permanently glued it all together

@chris a,

Your work looks amazingly like 'photo3' from @RRDOC.  Really cool.

Thanks for the positive feedback....  I didn't come up with all those techniques in a vacuum !!!  Like you I spent many hours looking at prototype photos and even more time scanning YouTube videos and tutorial videos on weathering freight cars, brick walls, roads and taking notes of techniques that I thought produced excellent results.   

The scribing/scratching of plastic with Razor saws, Sharp knives, dental pick tools etc is a technique I use on many projects as it really does a great job of simulating wood grain, aging, splitting defects on molded plastic beams, stairs, decks etc.

Creating grain, splitting/checking and splintered ends of boards totally enhances all the following weathering steps.

I have been using Pan Pastels as a final blending finish for about 6-7 years now since I found it at the Big E show in Springfield, MA it's a great product. It's easy to control, so you can create stains and dirt accumulation easily without having go where you don't want it.

@chris a,

1. So the 'wood' deck is actually the original plastic one?

2. The plastic deck was removable?

@texgeekboy posted:

@chris a,

1. So the 'wood' deck is actually the original plastic one?

2. The plastic deck was removable?

Correct, on this particular MTH Premier Flat Car, the chassis(frame) shown in the photos can be removed from the upper deck.  This flat car came from the factory with the Sebawing Beer Trailers on it.  I removed the hardware for mounting the two trailers as they will be used in the Industrial district at a Distribution Warehouse.  The few small holes left in the deck from the trailer mounts, I just filled to blind them

Yes the deck as shown in the photos is the original molded plastic MTH Deck, just scribed and weathered as described above.  It's held down with 4 small screws on each end.   

One other important NOTE for  @Dave_C     Dave after some thought back to how I lowered this MTH flat car....   I believe I cut off the "top Hat" raising the truck mounts too high, with a Razor saw to get 90+% of the plastic removed, then I finished cleaning out that bore with a Uni-Bit, not a Forstner Bit.

Once I got the through hole sized so that the first washer was a snug fit, that's the washer with the mating ID for MTH truck mount shoulder) then I "counter-bored" the other side to remove the 4 pie shaped pieces so I would have a good "shelf" to recess the larger fender washer from the upper side.   

The last hint if it's not obvious, is you have measure and locate the center lines of  the original truck mount holes before you start cutting and drilling them out.   I usually take a scrap piece of 1/4 inch plywood and mark and punch the center of the two truck mount holes and mark out, or better glue down a small piece of scrap to locate the entire frame one side and one end  so I am sure when I am done the trucks are where they are supposed to be. 

Thats great looking work Chris! I was wondering if you use the same method if you come across a car that is to high for Kadee couplers?

@mike g. posted:

Thats great looking work Chris! I was wondering if you use the same method if you come across a car that is to high for Kadee couplers?

Not exactly Mike.   There are numerous companies that sell Shims for Kadee couplers and most every different car body/frame you mount them on requires a shim of some thickness to line up with the Kadee Coupler Gauge. 

I lower most of my cars because in my opinion about 75% of the 3 rail cars sit too high off the rails to look realistic.  Where the ride height ends up is more a function of what I have to do lower it, when I am done with the lowering operation, then I get the Kadee Coupler Gauge out.   

I placed a sizable order for shims of different thicknesses from All Nation Line Hobbies.  John Wubbel, bought All Nation years ago, and he  3D prints Kadee shims that are very cost effective and enable me to dial in the correct height pretty easily.   

Do a search for   " allnationline.com/WP/?product_cat=shims"   His shims are graduated in mm,  1 mm = 0.040" or 40 thousandths.  I think I ordered everything from .5 mm to 2.00 mm shims from John in .25 mm increments.

Nice work, Chris! Haven't had occasion to kit-bash or replace a flatcar deck yet, but I did use the same type of cheap wooden coffee stirrers to fabricate the deck of a loading dock and simulate vertical siding on a recent scratch build:

The tolerances are obviously a lot looser, and I was a lot less finicky about the final color or variation, but the process (and the result) was similar. Jim Teeple also regularly uses those sticks in his magnificent scratch builds.

Great work Chris.  I like your use of Pan Pastels.  I suspect they are easier to apply to individual boards than paint or even weathering chalk.

Here is a link to the original post from Dave Minarik on lowering MTH gondolas (or flat cars).  He re-uses part of the cutoff truck mounting boss, so there is no need to add a washer.  It is easy to glue back in place with a liquid plastic solvent glue.  I have used his technique on my fleet of piggyback flats and it really improves their appearance.

The car on the left is lowered, stirrups replaced, rub rails added, deck weathered, and waiting for Kadees and end ramps.  The one on the right is stock MTH.

This brings the MTH flat car deck down to match the Lionel PS-4 flat cars (which are the most prototypical, only 1/16" above scale deck height).  Weaver flat cars are much easier to lower:  remove the coupler and remount the truck with a shorter screw, then add Kadees.  They match the Lionel deck height as well.

Bob

Bob thanks for the information.

Okay, so I finally finished the project for which I started this thread.  I bought a NIB Lionel 16389 PRR Wheel Car, removed the wheel frame, and then worked with a vendor on eBay that sold O Scale laser cut picnic tables.  I asked him if he could make a sheet 11"x2.5", and he said no problem.  I got the sheet, cut out the bits to fit exactly on top of the frame, and then glued it on.  The first picture shows that, and the second picture shows what I'm doing with it.  My grandkid loves firetrucks, so I bought a NIB Lionel one specifically for this.  I'm now working with a fellow OGRer to have him make wheel chocks to keep it steady.