Regular readers may notice that this is later than usual and that’s because of the US holiday Labor Day. Not working in retail that means I’ve got an extra day off.
My plan was to have hit the garage while it was nice out to do some weathering but ran into some obstacles. First off I couldn’t find one of the paints I had purchased (or so I thought) specifically for weathering.
I did have the right supplies for painting and weathering some trucks and wheels though so I started tearing down some cars thinking I’d get a bunch done at once. That’s when the second catastrophe struck, the only thing I could get out of my airbrush was, well, air. A sub-optimal situation for painting.
Since I had already mixed some paint and somewhat annoyed I decided to brush paint the trucks.
Which I did, here’s a not terribly great picture super cropped image from my phone. Since I’d gone this far and was still a little annoyed about the airbrush thing decided to try the next step which was to use weathering powders to made it look old and rusty. This truck is off an older style 70-top cement hopper which could be 50-60 years old by the general era I’m modeling so it’d be pretty rusty (it’s hard to explain but with my annoyed mood in regards to the airbrush for some reason really weathering it seemed better than light weathering).
Same truck different sides, I used Bragdon Powders for this, mostly with the Dark and Medium Rust but a little Light rust. Unfortunately since I don’t have a working airbrush I can’t put a matte varnish on it so it’s not likely to find itself operating on the layout anytime soon.
One of the other things I wanted to try was modeling a newish wheel using a the light rust.
For this I did a grimy wash similar to the trucks and then give it a good coating of light rust. I think it will work but I’ll probably need to see it in use before I’m entirely sold
Matt's Railroad Blog 