Believe it or not, I have an old Athearn BB F45 that is still " new-in-box"!! I decided to finally improve it a bit and have done the positive wiring portion of the old Athearn “5 wire” electrical upgrade. Here come the questions: 1- the frame is painted black, but it is a very thick coat, almost as if it were “dipped” in the paint can, so to speak. Was that an artifact of manufacture or did it have to do with insulating the frame in any way? 2- I have not done the complete 5-wire process, as I will be running it DC for a bit, but I decided to leave the original front bulb in place, as it is already set up to light up in both directions as wired. Should I just go ahead and replace it with an LED (+resistor) now or wait until I convert it to DCC with a circuit board later ( hence the partial 5-wire job for now)? 3- As it is, I am wiring a LED for the rear twin lights above the rear porthole door, reversing the wiring so that it lights up only when reverse running- any issues there? 4- The motor runs better already, so I am not going to fiddle with what works now, until I DCC it later, but should I consider repowering it at that point? 5- The paint scheme is GN Big Sky Blue on this model, but in actual photos, the gray top area looks black- what is the real color that GN used on the top of the hood in that scheme? Sorry for the long post, but I didn’t find many answers in my online search prior to this. Thanks, Cedarwoodron
Paint: This may be helpful.
For the top of the GN F45, the color was
Great Northern Gray (DuPont Code: DuLux 88- AC229)
Take a look at this: http://www.gn441.com/paint.html
According to modelers on the Train Orders forum, SP Lark Dark Grey (if you can still find it) comes “reasonably close” to the appearance.