I pretty much model all wood cars. The trouble is they look nothing like wood.
So this is where I’m stuck. I figure I can dirty them up. I figure I can rust them up. I figure I can get mud spray.
I just can’t get started because the base colors are not right and I worry that to get them right I have to strip the lettering. I have enough stuff waiting around for me to get my lettering butt in gear. So I get them stripped and painted and they still aren’t weathered.
But to be honest, I’m getting sick of looking at plastic cars on my layout.
I know others will disagree but nothing beats the look of real wood. For a simple project take some scale 1 x 4s dye em in alcohol and shoe dye mix and glue em’ down to the deck of a flat car…Tell me what you think then…I know there are a thousand ways to fake wood with plastic, but to my eye most of these methods lack the depth of the wood grain. Buy Kappler or Mt. Albert scale wood, not balsa or soft pine…
Check the deck on the flat car and the sides of the side dump gon, they are real wood…
To weather a wood model, you want to make it look like the paint is coming off. That’s what weathered wood does. Of course, it depends on How weathered you want them. Just dusty or ready for a trip to the rip track and paint shop… You might want to try a thinned water color wash… VERY thin of the color you are after to start with. Then drybrush a silverish gray where you want to simulate lost paint. In case you don’t know, dry brushing is a technique where you put some paint on a brush, dab Most of it off to the point where there is almost none left and then kind of lightly scrub the areas where you want to put the remaining paint (on the model)… Remember with rusting, that rust is more brown, not orange (like the floquil rust color). On 19th century wood models, which is what I assume you are doing, rust color would probably be sparce… Nails and bolts and things like that…
Think about the area you are representing… Is it really going to be muddy at time
Well, I’m in the camp of thought that nothing looks more like real wood than…plastic. Wood grain is WAY too big to properly represent scaled down wood in just about any tabletop scale, including O and G. While real wood might look “right” to our eyes, it’s completely wrong.
Mouse, you’re right when you say that wood cars in period photos all look pretty good. That’s because labor and paint was cheap, and cars were a major investment. Railroads, up through the early 1950s, shelled out the ca***o repaint their cars every five to eight years or so, partially because of an awareness of a good corporate image, and partially because older paints only lasted a few years before they deteriorated to the point that they stopped protecting the sides of cars (which is why they were painted in the first place). The photo of the Wabash car above, while great reference photos, only convey the image of a car that’s been sitting in a museum in Indiana for the past 20 years, not the picture of the car in service when it was relatively new.
Brand new wood cars were tight, shiny, and almost indistinguishable from steel cars. Refer to the historic ACF photos on the Fallen Flags site for examples of just how good they looked: http://www.rr-fallenflags.org/acfx/acf-h.html
Weathering in-service wood cars isn’t all that different from weathering steel cars. You need to tone down the shine, add a layer of general grime, add weathering tot he roof, and add detail highlighting. Bob Smaus’ recent MR article on weathering is the best I’ve seen on the topic, and covers a wide range of techniques and materials, so I’d refer to that for specifics. Just remember that not all cars on your layout should be weathered to the same degree. Some cars should be new and shiny, some should be due for a repaint (but still not look as bad as those Wabash cars), and the bulk should be various stages of dirty.
Oh, and as for that mud spray, I wouldn’t recommend it. While there is some photo evidenc
I wonder if doing a drybru***echnique with black paint would get a type of grained effect if done with just one or two swipes along the length of the boards to get the base look you want. Then washes in brown, or grey, or “Dull-Coat”, even India Ink to see how that works. You’ll have to experiment.
I would try steel wool, even a wire brush with a couple of light swipes to see the effect on the plastic. Even multiple scores with an X-acto. Then grays and India Ink.
Weathering can be a really simple addition and doesn’t need to be at all complicated.
I buy Floquil Grimy Black by the six bottle box. Thin the grimy black by about 4 times what you would normaly do, kick the pressure regulator for your air brush up to about 40 PSI and give it a thin coat until you have the degree of weathering you want. Vary it from car to car. When you’ve got the cars to the point you like, fini***hem up w/ a coat of Testors Dulcote. You’ll be suprised at what an improvement just the Dulcote will make on the typical plastic car. The big thing is DON"T OVERDO IT! Once you get it down, the hardest part of weathering is knowing when to stop.
Another thing to remember is that weathering happens as things get old. A lot of the stuff we model shouldn’t be modeled because in the era we’re modeling it, its not old. For example the Wabash car. Ify u are modeling in the 1970’s then it might be appropriate to weather it that way. But if its the 1940’s the car would be in much better shape. Another issues is that cars, being made of wood, didn’t last as long. They wore out rather quickly, after 10-15 years of service they were pretty well ready to be retired. Coal cars especially. Steel cars lasted a lot longer.
I have had good luck with washes of blacks, grey’s and browns. I prefer solvent (paint thinner, laquer thinner or alcohol) based paints for washes since they bead up less. One problem with the older cars is that the model makers painted them like circus floats. 75% of your cars should be either some shape or reddish brown or black. Reefers could be anything from white to yellow to orange to green. There are those special boxcars in line service that can be bright red, blue, white or even green.
Check out Art Griffin’s decals if you want to paint your own, lotsa great stuff there:
Other than gondola or flatcar decks or possibly roofwalks, what you should see when you look at a car is … paint. Most cars were made of finished wood, smooth, and given one or two coats of paint. You didn’t actually see the wood. You rarely saw grain on the wood. I guess I’m in the plastic camp, at least for finished wood.
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