Loads

What about adding loads?

Sure, but...

Loads work fine if you are headed from the mine to the power plant, but what if you have the "empties out" train?

These cars are terribly light. With good Intermountain or equivalent wheels, they work okay, but from time to time, a truck will pick any opportunity to jump off the track. I can only imagine how bad it will be with a DPU on the rear.

coalporter weight

prop the car up to the angle of the slope sheet, Pour in some white glue and lead shot. After it dries put a thin styrene slope sheet in to cover it and paint.

Sunrise Enterprises had supplied the weights and....

Is this what you want? It weighs about 3.2 ounces per one set. The disadvantage is that it is a little wide. Filing of dozens is hard, I have been working on for years.

Use a grinder it will trim

Use a grinder it will trim them up faster. Also stacks of sheet lead can be cut with shears and used to fill the voids if the weights above are unavailable to you.

Similar to the Sunrise weights...

I cut a piece of styrene to fit down the slope sheet, and a small vertical pice to make up the end. The shape of the pieces are pretty much the same as outside perimeter of the sunrise weight. That leaves an empty cavity that I put a hole into from below and filled with lead shot. A little thin super glue to stop any rattling. Covered the hole with lead sheet I then placed down the center sill.

Wow !!!

sunrise enterprises has produced exactly what I was envisioning. The last time their website was updated was 5 years ago. They said they were keeping their molds, but I can't imagine they would want to sell them for what they are probably worth.

http://sunrisenterprises.com/

Does anyone know who might have a bunch of stock ?

I guess I will use lead shot as the suggestions have indicated if this is my only other option.

LBF cars

E&C and LBF cars have the worst trucks ever.  I have dozens of the coalporter cars and have tried several things to make them stay on the track better, starting with replacing the wheels.  Most of the trouble seems to be the screw not being straight in the bolster.  I have opened up the hole slightly and chamfered its edge.  I have also angled the front and back of the disc on top of the truck where the car sits.  This lets the truck rock front to back a little.  That seems to help but if I have a derailment it is probably one of those cars.  I recently completed a loadout to fill the cars with walnut shell coal which adds a couple ounces to the weight so I didn't want to add extra weight.  I just put a piece of 1/4" lead rod between the tubs on the bottom.  Good luck,

Paul

My go-to weights are

My go-to weights are Nickels... at 5c each, there is Little ! that is cheaper, and I almost never run out!  Adhesive I use is caulking...

Another consideration is shape of your voids... perhaps BBs... (I use a cloth bag as a weight for gluing irregular shapes.)   Neither is magnetic... which can also be a consideration. 

NJWG seems to have the best answer here... adapted to your heavy materials.    Good luck!

Sheet lead?

1/8 lead sheet weighs about 0.88 oz per square inch. It can be cut to size with metal shears.

Rotometals sells it in rolls (8 lbs/ ft).

pqe

Walthers vs LBF/E&C coalporters

Here is what I did...

I took a 1/4" square tube which in real life would be 21" x 21" which is probably a little too big for a center sill, but I need weight and a lot of it someplace where it looks sort of believable. The Walthers car is on the left and the LBF car is on the right. I think the Walthers tubs are a little larger than the LBF tubs which yields more room for a larger center sill. The brass tube was filled with molten lead and the end result is 1.8 ounces of weight that is relatively hidden.

The brass tube with the lead core is visible in this view.

This is what it looks like with the truck in place

Then, underneath the slope sheet, I placed 3/4 ounce of lead wheel weights and will cover these with a new styrene floor. I thought about the sheet lead idea and the lead shot which are both good ideas.

The Walthers car as delivered except for new 36" Intermountain wheels, which add like 0.6 ounces, now weighs in at 4.0 ounces for an empty car.

 The LBF / E&C car weighs in at 4.6 ounces with the leaded center sill, Intermountain wheels and 3/4 ounce of weight under each slope sheet.

Lookie at what I did !!!

Alright gang, 

Look what I did! I made a silicon mold using Alumilite Mold Rubber. I wasn't sure it was going to work because no place in the directions does it say it can be used for molten lead.

I guess there are too many lawyers waiting to bail out people who have no concept that lead is dangerous. Lead needs to be worked with in a well ventilated place and you need a respirator. Oh yes, molten lead is like 625 degrees Fahrenheit. That will burn you. 

Well, it worked well.  The guys who make fishing weights said it would and they were correct. Just be careful. The silicone ends up getting much hotter than I expected. 

Here is the finished mold. As I worked with it, I discovered one of the molds was just a tad bit too big. The only way to fix that is to repour the mold, so this one will have to do. 

 The pours are not nearly as smooth as I expected, but it looks like just about any other lead "ingot" I have ever seen. I am sure there is some better way to allow these to cool that will yield a smooth finish, but I do not know what it is. 

 The important part is that the small details like the little area required to clear the truck screw and reinforcement for the screw fit perfectly. 

 This closeup shows how well the weight fits in the slope sheet area that E&C, LBF, Hubert, etc. molded flat. I guess that is good, because it allows a modeler to add weight right where it is necessary. 

 The overall look will be good once the weight is siliconed in and a thin piece of styrene forms a complete slope sheet. These two lead weights account for approx. 3 ounces of weight. Following NMRA, this car should weigh 1 ounce plus 1/2 ounce for every 10 feet of car. So, 4.4 ounces or so. My weights are not perfect, but the car weighs in between 4.2 and 4.6 ounces when assembled with Intermountain wheels. I presume it will weigh just a bit more when the new slope sheet is in along with the hopper wall bracing, so I'm gonna call it, "right on the money".

Good job!

A couple more thoughts in the process and E&C/LBF/Huberts cars.  There was a thread recently about lead reacting with white glue (polyvinyl acetate, PVA).  The lead reacts with the PVA and makes lead acetate which has only 1/3 the density of lead, hence 9x the volume.  There were photos of cars forced back to kit form by the reaction when lead shot was affixed with PVA.  Moisture and humidity make it much worse for sure, others claim no problems after 20+ years, YMMV.

Another issue with E&C cars is that they are each about .120" shorter over the pulling faces than Walthers cars.  It is not an issue for the most part and I didn't discover it until I made an indexer for a rotary dumper.  The indexer grabs a coupling 3 cars from the dumper so the car misses the ideal spot in the dumper by .360" and doesn't work.  The solution was to move the bolster assembly .060" toward the end of the car.  The screw that holds the truck needs to be shortened so it doesn't come through the top of the bolster. It is easy enough on the older cars but Intermountain retooled the bolster so it is now one piece with the bracing in the end of the car.  They are much harder to fix and I have a replacement part made I will duplicate in resin when I get back to work.

Paul

I'm gonna use silicone

I glue in my weight with silicone. It never dries out and once it is stuck, it seems to stay stuck unless someone pulls on it. I use tiny tubes that get the weight for 4 - 5 cars at once. I know a lot of people use PVA for things like lead shot, so that is certainly good information. 

Your rotary dumper must be one of those on YouTube? Those are simply cool. I had big hopes of doing that someday, but I'm moving so slow on my layout that I'll be happy just to have stuff moving. The E&C/LBF/Hubert cars are good four foot models. It doesn't surprise me they are wrong. Can you believe they are all on eBay for like $18.00?  I'mm like, "thanks, but I'll skip those at that price..."

silicon

I dunno about using silicon Kirk, I've heard some horror stories about silicon hopper implants. Or was that silicon hooter implants?

prices

I don't think I ever paid more than $11 or $12 for one of the kits and some were as little as $4.  Not bad for, as you said, a 4ft model. The only ones that were really disappointing are the AeroFlo cars they did, the printing on them is terrible and of course, there are no decals. But then the BN Bethgon cars Walthers did was a scheme that lasted a couple years at most and all the cars are lettered as the 'A' unit of the "as delivered" 5 car draw barred set.

My dumper is one of the ones on Youtube,

Paul