Schnabel Cars --> WECX 800 / 801 ( KRL 3600 / 3601)

Martin, you should include your email address in your profile to make it easier for folks with knowledge to help you.

Martin - railpictures (one of the best sites for premier railroad photography, IMHO) is here:  https://railpictures.net/index.php

and there is a search box where you can search for keywords.  If you type in Schnabel, it will come up with 71 pictures.  I didn't look at all of them, but some of the pictures might have some of the detail you are looking for.  You will also notice that with each picture description there are sometimes links - e.g., WECX 800 - that might reveal additional pictures where the word "Schnabel" wasn't used in the anywhere in the descriptive materials.

Note added:  It also turns out that typing 'Schnabel' into the OGR searchbox will bring up a lot of photos of both 1:1 scale Schnabel cars and scale cars, some pictures with a lot of detail...

Martin:

Have you tried this website: http://southern.railfan.net/sc...l/schnabel_cars.html

If you haven’t seen it, that site has many close-up photos of 800 & 801 as well as a section on Modeling Schnabel Cars.

Bill

Carl, emailadress is added. Thanks for the hint.

@Bill and Rich many thanks for your feedbacks. I will check those homepages for additonal informations.

Martin you do incredible work!!!!! I'm so impressed! Can I ask what the frames are made of? It appears the bolsters are made from soldered brass. How do you achieve the delicate shapes without discoloration? Also what are the big mid frames made from? They appear to be machined from 1 piece of aluminum?

I found SB,III to be a great resource for Schnabel pictures! He has hundreds of pages and even some Krupp schematics. http://sbiii.com/rrsch801.html

I've made 2 different Schnabel cars myself but I've always done wood and never attempted modeling an actual car

Beautiful!

Hello Will,
the brass parts are all milled on an 5-axle millingmachine and than brassstrips and more are solderd on it. I'm not soldering with an flame. I use an restiance soldering, but first I'm heating the part with an hairdryer.

Your are correct with the silver parts, that are made from hard aluminium. The details wanna be glued with an special adhesive. I found a great mechanicel company, wich gave the parts to their apprentices for learning purposes (final programming and milling). The chief told me they had to study quite a while before producing.

Right now they got the next painting for the last two big parts and the chief told me to make it even more defficult. Attached you see one of the sketches for those parts. 

The idea is to have the car running (without all the details)  at the end of the year on our layout. I wanna make some tests, to find out, how long the load could be. Starting point will be 165 inch and endpoint will be 230 inches. We will see.

Martin - that really is impressive modeling.  A question about your "I wanna make some tests, to find out, how long the load could be. Starting point will be 165 inch and endpoint will be 230 inches."  Do you mean "inches" or "mm" perhaps?  Most layouts aren't 20 ft (~6 m) long... (??)

Rich, I made a failure during calculating from mm to inches. Corect for the length will be: 25 (650mm) to 35 inches (900mm). Sorry for the mishap.

Martin

Wow that's really amazing! The resistance soldering explains how your seams are so beautiful. I have a 3 axis CNC milling machine at home and as a test I attempted to make some simplified mid frames for the wecx 800. Milling those shapes out of solid blocks of material is incredibly tricky! You must have found a great company to make them for you! I visited a huge machine shop local to me and they didn't even want to attempt my simplified shapes.

As for the air tanks...

This page of S. Berliner's has some 3D models other people have made of the wecx 800 on it:

http://sbiii.com/rrschnb5.html

This particular picture from S.Berliner III's website is courtesy of M. Runyan:

http://sbiii.com/schnpix/runyan-2.jpg

I thought of this particular image because it appears Runyan modeled the parts you're talking about. Maybe you could contact him and see if he can provide you with better pictures?

Martin - 25 to 35 inches long is still quite impressive.  I don't have a good idea of the "real world' lengths hauled by Schnabel cars -- 25 inches scales up to 100 feet (~31 m) and 35 inches to 140 ft (~43 m).  Wow, those are long loads.

That S. Berliner site is great - lots of arcania and info.  Martin, one of the drawings on that site shows a load of over 33 m (109 ft) long...