Now that I have a trains worth of pulpwood flats, I find some of the plastic loads are painted gray like this:
And some of the plastic pulpwood loads are a light tan like this:
And this car has a real wood load made from twigs off backyard trees. It clearly has the best color. I’m looking for a paint color that is closest to the real thing. Any one know which of our surviving paint vendors might have a paint that looks like the real wood? May be I will just print out the real wood load on my inkjet and take it down to Wally Mart and look thru their acylic craft paints for the best match.
Without wishing to be critical of the OP, personally I’m not too fond of the molded pulp loads. Regardless of colour they still look like plastic moldings IMHO.
The club has several bulkhead flat cars that need loads. I am going to try to make loads using 1/8" and 3/16" wood dowels. I plan on painting the dowels various shades of gray and brown, as well as some white over brown (birch and aspen) with other suitable colours applied in a few places. I’m hoping that if I paint the dowels before cutting them the centers will retain the natural wood colour and the paint will look like bark on the outside edge.
It depends on which stage of the cycle of transporting pulpwood you model.
Freshly cut pulpwood should look like, well, freshly cut wood and the wood sticks from the yard capture that reasonably well. As pulpwood is shipped to central storage areas and is stored in big piles before use, that fresh cut look is fine. Once stored it can sit for a long time and it takes on something of the gray of driftwood but it is not a painted gray color which is the problem with the first photo. Nor does it tend to look like the yellow measles which is the problem with the other photo.
I would take the real sticks and spray the ends with a mix of isopropyl alcohol and a small amount of india ink to get a darkened (but not blackened) appearance, assuming you are shipping pulpwood from storage pile to final customer.
A little fun with a calculator give 3/16 dowels being about 16 scale HO inches, and 1/8 about 11 inches, A resonable size for pulpwood, but I suggest no larger.
Thanks for doing the math. I tend to just go with what looks right so I was guessing about the sizes. In truth, there aren’t many other choices of dowel sizes in that range so I’m glad that what I chose will work.
Thanks for your suggestion about applying a gray wash to the ends of the logs where they are in storage. We are going to make a couple of large piles of stored logs for the Hearst scene so obviously they wouldn’t all be fresh cut.
Great advice everyone!
Apologies to David Starr the OP. I seem to have stolen the thread.
Chris is right, Dave, and I’ve got an acre and a half with lots of trees and bushes - some help tidying-up the sticks would be much appreciated, and you can have them for free!
Thanks for the offer! My back won’t let me do my own yard work anymore so I’m sure as heck not about to help you with yours!!![swg][(-D][(-D][(-D]
Seriously, I agree and I disagree with the idea of using real twigs for pulp loads. I have never seen a pulp load made from real twigs that looks totally realistic. If I can use the OP’s own example, there are too many larger than realistic sized logs in the load. I’m sure that if we were to take Wayne’s entire 1 1/2 acres and harvest it very carefully we could get enough straight twigs that are between a scale 10" and 16" to fill our bulkhead flats and form a couple of decent sized piles, but unfortunately there seems to be a universal trend amongst the natural twig load makers to use twigs that just aren’t realistic in size. Sorry, but I am entitled to my opinion. No offense intended to the users of natural twigs.
I’m hoping that by painting the 1/8" and 3/16" dowels properly I can get well defined, accurately sized and coloured realistic loads. We shall see.
Please don’t expect any results soon. My back is so painfull that I have to spend most of my days lying down. I can sit for three or four hours at most. I have a ton of projects on my workbench but I haven’t been able to spend time on most of them. Recently I have used my reduced working time to build the control panels for the club layout and to upgrade numerous turnouts with point rail jumpers and live frog feeds. I also spend a lot of time doing club related business on the computer. All of the various tasks cause severe cramps in my back, as is happening right now as I type. I’m likely due for surgery some time in the new year. I promise I will eventually get around to all of these projec
The problem I see with the paint match idea is that the ends are not really a solid color. So you are not going to be able to match the ends without doing some additional detailing. In addition, the plastic loads have different color ends so any paint you find that matches the real wood will appear different on the plastic items because the base colors are different.
What I would do is paint the ends of one of the plastic loads a neutral color. Then take the plastic load and the real load to a place like Home Depot (when they aren’t busy) and ask them if they can match a color to the primary color of the real wood. They have some sort of magic machine that they use to do this.
Then you need to purchase a sample jar of that color. It will probably cost $4-$5. After they
It also depends on what type of wood is being used. I’ve seen red pine on cars, which tends to be thinner straight wood. I’ve also seen hard woods used, a lot of them are not straight and not very big circumferentially, most hard woods 11"and up go to sawmills as logs, it’s worth more. Then the smaller tops get cut for pulp. Most pulp is 10" and under. If you prime those plastic loads first, then use craft paints, probably white with tints of tan, yellow, and red , plus a brown dot in the center, you’ll get close to real pulp. Remember, nothing is one color.
Trying to get two photos of a scratch pulpwood load from Imgur to here, but not smart enough to make it happen. and yes, I did read the instructional post.[:'(]
Your links work fine, but here they are as pictures…
…and that load looks pretty darn good to me! I would suggest, though, that the car’s ends be put back in place, as there’s no way that those logs would restrain the load without that additional support.
