Lehigh Valley Reefers from Canfield and McGlone Kits
The Kit
John Canfield and Bob McGlone have offered a number of resin kits in recent years on a limited run basis. They go quickly and that's it. As far as I know, they have only re-released one kit, the Tiffany reefer that described here. I bought four of the first run and have constructed two. No idea when I will get around to building the remeining two. Thay advertise the availability of new kits on the EarlyRail Yahoo group forum, and they are usually spoken for within a very few days.
Construction
The kit instructions are very detailed and I largely followed them. The biggest issue was where nut-bolt-washer parts used on the master to represent the attachment points for grabirons and the ends of truss rods did not form fully in the resin casting. Some were ok. I followed the directions by shaving off the malformed bumps and adding my own nbw's. This went pretty fast because after they were scraped off, in most cases a small dimple was left behind, which I could use to guide my drill to make a hole for the casting.
I did have an issue with the roof of the car, including the roof walks. Both cars had a definitive unevenness in the roof, sort of like a wave. Also, I found the roofwalk castings too thick for my taste and seemed to accentuate the wave in the roof.
To correct the unevenness, I turned the body over and sanded the hatch and roofwalk supports until the tops pretty much fell in a plane. That meant some supports were higher than others, but that would all disappear when the hatches and boards for the walks were added. I replaced the castings supplied with new roofwalks made from an appropriate thickness of styrene, three boards across. I think the results justified the extra work.
I have since built another one of their models, a Reading boxcar. The roof was nice and even but I once again substituted my own roofwalks for a thinner profile.
Paint and Lettering
Information I gleaned from the EarlyRail Yahoo Group stated that the color of Lehigh Valley Railroad reefers in the late 1800's was "lime green." I tried a couple of appropriate colors I picked up at a Michael's art store, and this is the one I selected. Even had lime in the name. Sort of an appalling color, isn't it?
Lettering is from decals I made myself using Micro-Mark decal paper on a laser printer. I downloaded the font from the B&O historical society site. I don't have a picture of such a car to work from, but the lettering and placement follows from what appears to have been standard LV practice at the time.
I glued on the hinges after paint and lettering were done to get a nice neat job. I did not try to also paint the door latching assembly or grabirons a contrasting black because I was not confident in not making a mess.