My wife and I recently bought a new house, but can’t move in for two more months. This has meant that continuting to build out my nascent layout makes no sense, and that I need to find something else to occupy my time. So, for the first time, I thought I would take a crack at painting and decal-ing [is that a word?] a freight car. After digging through some forum posts (both here and at OGR), I downloaded some painting and decaling info from Kalmbach and did my best to figure out what I was doing
I picked up a used Weaver 3-bay ACF car in BN colors at Tinplate Junction in Oaktwon and let it sit while I figured out what to do with it. My wife’s brother and I recently went up to BC for a week of backcountry skiing, and in the process discovered the Kelowna Pacific, a short-line affiliate of the CN that operates in the Okanagan Valley east of Vancouver. I did some web-based research but didn’t come up with much, so I figured I might as well free-lance the car (though I did download the KPR logo off the web).
I made the decals myself, using a laser printer, and used a basic can of grey spray paint atop a layer of primer. I couldn’t find any Micro Set for Micro Sol anywhere, so I used Walther’s Solvaset. Once the decals had set, I coated everything with Dulcote.
It’s not the greatest looking car, but its not bad for a rookie (even my wife was impressed, and she’s an artist). I would love to hear your suggestions for enhancing the look of the next round.
-Tom
Grand Lake, Alta, and Truckee
Those pictures didn’t turn out right (it’s been a while since I posted anything) so I’m trying again:
Hope everyone has a great week.
great job. The web is a good source for decals that you can resize, recolor, etc in photoshop
Looks good! Keep it up. [:)]
underworld
[:D][:D][:D][:D][:D]
I do what could conservatively be considered an extensive amount of repainting. And not because I wanted to, but because there are so many roads that are totally ignored in the traditional size range. Or when they do once in a while get represented, they’re made so cheap I wound never buy them, or they get the paint wrong. I’d guess that up to 75% of my rolling stock is now custom repainted and even more have their original existing paint jobs altered. With my locos it’s nearly 100% repainted.
For example Lionel did a blue Conrail gondola and a red CNJ coast guard scheme hopper. Both were molded color cars and because they didn’t used enough color in the plastic stock, they are both translucent. Bluuuug. Even though I had really wanted both cars I just could bring myself to waste money on cars that would require repainting. A few years later Lionel did a gray Erie Lackawanna box car where the gray is several shades too dark and the color of the lettering is wrong too. I wouldn’t be so picky but I’ve seen those box cars… MPC did a better job with the little 8 inch ones as far as getting the color right. K-Line has done some CNJ cars in the past, but because they use white styrene as their base, I ended up repainting some of those cars right back to CNJ just so they would be opaque and not translucent.
I don’t need or even want scale size or detail. BUT it would be nice to have quality cars that don’t glow when they go by a light, or have a light inside them. And it’d be nice if the color could be at least close to what it’s suppose to be. The Lionel Erie Lackawanna blue box car from the mid 1970’s isn’t even close. Arrrrg! Another one I wanted and just couldn’t bring myself to buy because the color was so utterly wrong!!!
As much I as I love some of the northeast fallen flag roads from the 1970’s, I also like the current lines of today that have been grossly overlooked in the traditional size range, with a few scant exceptions. And even Williams can’t get the Norfolk South
Looks to me like a solid.realistic freight car that one would see in the real world.Not very flashy,but many acf center-flow hoppers have fancy paint schemes.A good effort!
Sorry I meant to say that not many acf-center-flow hopper have fancy paint schemes.