{"id":353,"date":"2012-05-05T13:40:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-05T13:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanootoday.com\/?p=353"},"modified":"2021-06-23T02:53:08","modified_gmt":"2021-06-23T02:53:08","slug":"three-hawk-50-oo-boxcars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanootoday.com\/?p=353","title":{"rendered":"Three Hawk 50\u2019 OO Boxcars"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Thanks to a link from an O gauge forum the topic of Hawk OO has been getting a bit of traffic lately. Thus, this is a great time to feature these three recently completed Hawk 50\u2019 boxcars (their No. 503 Auto Car), rebuilt from junkers and parts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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First up we have this pair. I like working on cars in groups if possible, and particularly cars of types not often seen. Hawk OO was first advertised in 1941 and only offered for a short while, so they are not often seen. Their boxcars were made in two construction formats. Some were made with a solid block body that is milled from one piece of wood. Others were built up from parts. These first two were of that type.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A nice \u201cbefore\u201d photo of the car in front may be seen here \u2013 an almost complete body and frame. It had been built up by a prior owner but then torn down for rebuilding prior to coming to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In the process (before it came to me) the ends of that car went missing. To solve that problem I made new sub-ends that are inset and new visible ends salvaged from a somewhat damaged swap meet purchase AHM HO stock car with the oversize ends. To that were added Eastern ladders, used on both of these cars. I think they came out pretty nicely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The car in the back had its own set of problems, the main ones being it had been weighted with plaster (!, a very bad idea) and it had been re-painted at least twice and had a VERY heavy coat of paint. What I did with it was strip off what parts I could and sand areas down. If you look close it still has some real issues but it is amazing what a clean coat of paint, a few fresh details, and good decals will do for a car.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Looking at the bottoms of these two you can see they have different frames but both are Hawk frames. I kept the S-C brake cylinder on the car with the heavy paint, and also visible is the plug where I drained out the loose plaster. And of course those are Scale-Craft trucks, which fit these vintage cars well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I decided on Milwaukee Road for this pair as they had on their roster a similar style smooth side boxcar (more info here<\/a>) and I had decals to approximate the correct scheme.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This last photo is of another Hawk 50\u2019 car and a similar car built on a Picard body. This Hawk car is the solid body version. In shape it matches the built up body perfectly and would have been cut from the same cutters I believe back in the day. I did not have a frame for this and worked up a similar frame from wood strip as the car is plenty heavy, especially with the cast doors. The look I was going for was to match a set of five cars like the one behind. Someone had a project to make a string of ATSF 50\u2019 cars. This new car without heroic effort is similar in spirit and fit decals I had on hand. The older cars I don\u2019t have running yet and I suspect may never have been run on a layout. They are a project for another day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For now though I am enjoying the look of this restored set of Hawk 50\u2019 cars, a good solid pre-war product.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thanks to a link from an O gauge forum the topic of Hawk OO has been getting a bit of traffic lately. Thus, this is<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2417,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hawk"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/americanootoday.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/Hawk-50-pair.jpg?fit=888%2C532&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/americanootoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/americanootoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/americanootoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/americanootoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/americanootoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=353"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/americanootoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2422,"href":"https:\/\/americanootoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions\/2422"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/americanootoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/americanootoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/americanootoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/americanootoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}