Here’s a simple little project that produces some nice looking shipping crates for your railroad. I wish I could take credit for coming up with the idea, but I can’t. I read about it in one of my train magazines. The first step is to go to a craft store, like Michaels’s, and purchase a small bag of mixed sized wooden squares. For just a few dollars, you can get enough blocks to make as many crates as you will ever need. I then stained them with my leather dye/alcohol stains in three different colors.
I also glued some of them together to make rectangular combinations. Not all shipping crates are square. In a moment you’ll see how I hid the seams. Taking a steel straight-edge and a pencil, I then marked separations on four sides to represent individual boards in the crate. The two ends of the cubes which showed the wood grain were covered with individually cut pieces of strip wood. From a distance it’s hard to tell the 3-D boards from the penciled ones.
I’m not left handed, but for the purposes of photography, it’s easier to suggest the pencil work with my left hand, and shoot the picture with my right. The next step is to build the exterior framing of the crate, with stripwood stained in colors to match the little cubes.
The crate can be framed just on the corners, or cross-braced diagonally. I have even seen crates with “X” bracing, so I think I’ll make some of those, too. I use this framing to hide the seam between blocks glued together. See the last photo. You can leave one side of the cube unframed, or do all six sides, but I learned long ago that actors and stage personnel cannot always be trusted to set things down the correct way. I’m framing all six sides. When the framing is all completed, I take a sharp #2 pencil, and twirl it into the wood to create the look of nail heads.
The last step is to take some photo-reduced shipping labels, and glue them on the sides of the crates.
And there you have it. Nifty little crates to travel on flatcars, in boxcars and combines, or to sit on freight depot platforms.
Leave a comment