I’m trying to restore a couple of old post war AF trains and can’t find any reasonably priced spray paint. I could also use airbrush if I could find paint that was a perfect match. any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks Curtis
Curtis,
I would think you would have much better luck color matching with model paints rather than rattle can spray paints. Plus painting with an airbrush gives a much nicer and thinner coating preserving details.
Floquil, Tamiya and Testor’s Model Master line have many military colors as does Poly Scale. I don’t know about ScaleCoat and TruColor. I generally use Floquil for airbrushing but I have heard many good things about TruColor and ScaleCoat.
Good luck!
Welcome to the forums.
I think you will do better to go to the Classic Toy Trains section of the forums, as most of the folks here are into HO and N scale.
When you do write your post over there, tell them what particular item you are painting and the colors you need to match.
Good luck,
Richard
The Testors web site (http://www.testors.com/category/50736/Paints) has color “swatches” of all of their colors, both acrylic and solvent-based available. Testors manufactures both the Testors and Floquil/Pollyscale lines.
If you really want to match colors, though, your best bet is probably to mix your own and air-brush your model. Just make sure you mix enough paint that you can finish the project, because you’ll probably never be able to get an exact match to your original mix, even if you are very careful to recreate the same formula.
As long as you’ve posted here, what sort of trains are they? Do you have any pictures, or maybe you could describe them? I have a prewar AF train, and the colors are all rather basic ones that you can get as spray cans from the hardware store. I used Krylon and Testors spray paints, and the Krylon cans have an airbrush quality finish.
Floquil carries a line of prototype railroad colors in both enamel and acrylic
Scalecoat has 20 Tinplate Restoration colors in their catalogue.
http://www.weavermodels.com/page8.html
Rick