I have been watching YOUTUBE and there is a guy weathering trucks who seems to be dipping his brush in acrylic matte medium and then the rust powder and applying this to wheels. I am just starting weathering, have all the supplies, but am a bit confused about this. Any help?
Hello Moses,
Can you post the YouTube link here?
I’m talking railroad car trucks here, not highway trucks. The prototypes have been cast steel ever since the arch bar truck was phased out in the 1920’s. They were left unpainted to make it easier to see cracks in the castings. Exposed to the weather, they rusted out to an iron oxide rust color. I paint mine with rattle can red auto primer. Or Floquil rust. Or rail brown. I mask the axles holes with tape to keep the paint out of them.
Wheels. Older models with friction bearing trucks, the journal boxes would leak enough oil onto the wheel faces to make 'em look dark, almost black and greasy. I model this with oily black or grimy black applied with a brush. Modern roller bearing don’t leak oil, and the wheel faces acquire a uniform dry coating of mud and dirt. Rail brown is about right, or mud.
Painted trucks, no matter what color you paint them, look better than shiny black plastic ones. Painted plastic wheels look better than unpainted wheels.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjEPZrTxE_8 is the link.
I remove the wheels, mask the axle holes and the top bolster hole with bits of blue painters’ tape, and spray with rust or ruddy brown primer. Once that dries, I brush on black and brown weathering powder, which gets rid of the uniform look of the primed trucks. Then I spray them with Dull-Coat to seal in the weathering powder.
After removing the tape, I use a Micro-Mark truck tuner tool on the axle holes, to clean out an residues, either from manufacturing or weathering. Then I put in metal wheelsets. For trucks with plastic wheels, I replace them with Intermountain wheels I buy in bulk packs.
Do them in batches. All this painting is messy, and it doesn’t take any longer to paint a dozen of them than it does to do a pair.
Moses,
I am curious, about this, also, but not confused, long Video, so I’ll have to take some time to view, it all. My guess would be, to high light certain ares, rather than the whole part.
Cheers, [D]
Frank
As he says, he’s using the matte medium as a fixative for the powder.
I found this wheel mask from AMB Laserkit to be one of the handiest tools in my wheel weathering arsenal.
[edit: here’s a link- http://www.laserkit.com/masks.htm IF you choose to get one be sure you have a cement for acrylic for assembly, AMB recommends Ambroid Pro Weld]
You can find it for about ten bucks and they are made for most popular metal wheel sizes. I can weather about two dozen wheelsets in about an hour allowing drying time. I give a little india ink wash over rattle-can primer and I’m all done!
That hand painting with microbrushes looks TOO time consuming… I’d rather be running trains! Just my [2c]
Have Fun, ED
ED,
Interesting tool! Good Find.
Cheers, [D]
Frank
Glad you like it, Frank, here’s to 'ya [B]
A few more pointers when using this mask, go light on the paint! Hold the can a little farther than usual to get more of a dusting. IF you can get a “Fantip” nozzle like Krylon uses, all the better so you can get the wheel backs with more control. You can get ALL around the axels this way and it is tricky to shoot from the “closed” end of the mask. I suppose you could do a 2 step paint process where you would turn each wheelset 180° and reshoot. Depends on how picky you want to be.
If you don’t completely cover the wheel you get that annoying strobe-like effect, like a pinwheel!
Also, after reassembling the truck, run the treads over a cloth or paper towel wetted with alcohol or your prefered solvent, laid on a short stretch of track to be sure all traces of paint are off the treads. I had a “helper” weather about a dozen cars for me one time and before I knew it he was running all of them on the layout (this is before I had the AMB mask, too) It took me weeks to get all the residue off the rails!
AND the mask needs to be cleaned up after a few sessions so the paint build-up doesn’t get too thick.
Hope this helps… Ed
Ed,I have one of those but,perfer a rail brown paint marker since I found it much faster then a brush.I no longer rattle can paint in the house.[xx(]
I don’t use rust on my trucks at all since the prototype seems to be a grimy or flat black …I use a wash of weathered black.
Good point, Larry!
I seem to recall that the wheels with solid bearing journals almost always had a buildup of grime and dried oil on them since the felt seal at the journal box would leak and a lot of the car knockers would over fill the journal boxes and the oil would run out the back. Roller bearing wheels seem to be more of a rusty steel color since there’s no oily film on them.
Next time I do a batch I’ll try the paint marker, sounds like a much neater method…
The India ink wash I mention tones down the oxide color a bit, too. It looks like the “pro” in the video is using the stock shiny delrin wheelsets, not metal wheels. The chemically blackened Kadee and Intermountains have a much more realistic finish.
The only things I like about metal wheels is they put added weight on the rail and the shiny thread–like you see on the prototype.
I also shine up the edge of the wheel face like the prototype-a often overlooked detail.
I also shine up the edge of the wheel face like the prototype-a often overlooked detail.
Yes! I like that too, and it is an often overlooked detail! As far as metal-vs-plastic I have noticed that the plastic wheels seem to accumulate gunk more readily than the metal… and I like the sound of the metal wheels at the joints and frogs!
Take care, Ed
I’m gradually replacing all the plastic wheels on my rolling stock with metal. For me, the big thing is reducing rolling resistance. I’ve got a string of 11 old Mantua clamshell hoppers. With the original plastic wheels and metal trucks, I couldn’t pull them on a flat layout with a single relatively strong P2K Geep. After replacment with plastic trucks and metal axles, I can take the bunch of them around with a much lighter Bachmann 2-6-0.
I’ve got one of those wheel-mask gadgets, too. I only tried it once. It made a mess, and I think I spent so much time cleaning the treads and particularly the axle point that it just wasn’t saving me any time.
How do you guys make it work efficiently?
I fully agree…I didn’t mention that in this discussion because was focusing on weathering the wheels and truck frames.[;)]
There is a downside to metal wheels though…If your layout isn’t on zero bubble cars can and will roll on a slight downgrade once you uncouple them.
As far as the wheel doohickey I used a brush and after I was finish I used a paper towel to remove any paint.
I am making my own wheel mask. I found a piece of sheet plastic in my work room that is the same thickness as the wheel tread. The wheels are .366 in diameter. So if you take 2 pieces of plastic and tape them back to back and drill a 3/8 hole, the trucks will fit right in. Use a piloted drill for precision. Take a 1/2 inch piece of wood and epoxy it between the plastic pieces to allow for axle length and budda boom. I am still work on this. Should work though.
The wheels, whether metal or plastic, have very little to do with rolling resistance - most of that depends on the interface between the axle ends and the journals. Wheels with a poor tread profile can have a negative effect on rolling qualities, though.
As for painting wheels, I do 'em with a brush (and not a micro brush either). There’s no need to remove them from the trucks, and in most cases, no need to remove the trucks from the cars, either. It takes less than five minutes to do a car - wheelfronts, backs, and axles and there’s no masking, no jig to clean, and no disassembly and re-assembly time either. I usually weather the trucks (and wheels) on the car when weathering the car.
Wayne
Some people have steadier hands than others [:D] Don’t think I’d attempt to paint my wheels without removing them from the trucks. Of course, since the majority of models I assemble comes with plastic wheels and I replace them all with metal, I kind of already have the wheels out of the trucks.
I have two masking jigs, neoither of which is that one shown above. They work quite well, although I still use a microbrush, not spray. Perhaps if I had a spray booth and airbrush… They are also handy for holding the wheelsets to install resistors for block detection. Once that’s all done, I do spray on flat black to hide the shine, the resistor, and the conductive silver paint on the axles. I just use cheap Walmart store brand flat black for that instead of hooby paint. For the wheel faces, I use oily black poly scale.
For trucks, I’m lazy, I just stand them up on skewers and spray them with grimy black. Now that I’ve painted most all of my couplers, perhaps I will go through my rolling stock and put dabs of rust on the springs. None of my rolling stock is weathered, beyond the wheels and couplers, at this point - to me it would be like an endless pit, as soon as I got one car or loco weathered, the rest would look all out of place and need to be done. Perhaps with this “little bit at a time” in bite-size chunks, I will eventually have everything weathered at least slightly.
One thing I’d like to do, if I had a drill press, would be to duplicate one of those jigs only make it hold a lot more than 4 wheelsets. 8 or 12 at a time wouldn;t be unwieldy, 16 might be a bit too big. Depends on the function - the ones that look like the pictured one work for painting the faces as well as the backs, and for applying resistors. However, for just painting the faces, you could make one with 4 columns of 4 wheelsets and it wouldn;t be much bigger than that one. A square, without handle, would work for 16 wheel sets for painting the faces plus i