I purchased an HO scale Sunset Models “Prestige Series” PRR I1sa a couple years ago. Unfortunately, becasue of graduate school I was unable to do much with it beyond spending a while looking at how pretty it was in its box. I recently noticed that what I thought was solder holding the locomotive together appears to actually be grey epoxy. The locomotive appears brand-new: no wear or dirt on the drivers and no signs of wear on the tender pin.
Was it common for Sunset Models to use epoxy to assemble their brass locomotives, particularly for their lower detail “Prestige Series” models?
I’ve had a few Sunset Prestige engines over the years. They were all soldered together.
Some of my other brass has solder joints that do have a dark gray appearance that at first glance you would think it may be epoxy but I think the manufacturer uses some kind of “pickling” solution that turns the solder dull.
Yours may be epoxied, can’t say for sure, but I haven’t come across that on any of mine.
I do know, from reading about it here and there, that those who wish to paint their brass locomotives must ‘pickle’ the surfaces before applying any primers or paints. This process is like etching the surface to make it more sticky for applied finishes. My guess is that it oxidizes the bared metals, even those exposed in solder beads.
This is a Prestige-Series PRR 0-6-0 that I worked on a while back. It would almost look like that grey goop is epoxy but I assure you, it is lead solder:
I have several brass locomotives and cabooses from Alco Models, NJ Custom Brass, and OMI and every one of them has that grayish solder; primarily on the interior of the brass shell - just as pictured in Ed’s photo above.
I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t be epoxy, so I’d bet that if you scraped it with a knife, removing the oxidised coating, it would be shiny, the same as newly-applied solder.
I believe it’s actually paste type solder (the same thing is used in circuit board manufacturing). It works like glue to hold the parts together quickly, and then the whole thing is fed through a reflow oven to melt the solder and bond the joints. It’s a lot more efficient than hand soldering.
I have had brass models that seem to have been assembled using paste type solder. Either the paste was not heated enough to completely melt the solder or maybe the paste was not well mixed. but the result was a weak joint that sort of looked like epoxy.
I took an X-acto knife, found an unobtrisive spot on the model, and carefully scraped at the mysterious grey goop. The exposed material is quite shiny, so it is solder after all. The odd color and blobbiness of the solder joints had me completely fooled.
That’s exactly what the solder joints on my model look like - perhaps even a shade darker, but that could just be the lighting. What work did you do on the model?
