  Past hydrodynamic simulations have been able to reproduce the high
temperatures and densities characteristic of solar flares. These simulations,
however, have not been able to account for the slow decay of the observed flare
emission or the absence of blueshifts in high spectral resolution line
profiles. Recent work has suggested that modeling a flare as an sequence of
independently heated threads instead of as a single loop may resolve the
discrepancies between the simulations and observations. In this paper we
present a method for computing multi-thread, time-dependent hydrodynamic
simulations of solar flares and apply it to observations of the Masuda flare of
1992 January 13. We show that it is possible to reproduce the temporal
evolution of high temperature thermal flare plasma observed with the
instruments on the \textit{GOES} and \textit{Yohkoh} satellites. The results
from these simulations suggest that the heating time-scale for a individual
thread is on the order of 200 s. Significantly shorter heating time scales (20
s) lead to very high temperatures and are inconsistent with the emission
observed by \textit{Yohkoh}.

Astrophysics