MDC Climax kitbash

[cnrglen]

I did the weathering on the engine today. I thought I would take you through it step by step.
I do most of my weathering with an airbrush, a badger internal mix with a fine tip. I also use acrylic paints, since they dry so fast and the cleanup is easy, especially when you are changing colors so much.
I first airbrush the smokebox with dark gull gray. It's actually a pretty light, sort of ash gray, then I use a lighter white-ish gray to simulate the scale that water drips leave behind. I use a masking template made from a 3X5 card


After a careful spray of paint the water drips look like this:

after that I turn to adding rust on the engine, using the same template, I add rust drips and stains, and give certain parts of the engine (tender decks, couplers, pilots) some random rusting. Polly-S rust is no longer available so I've been using Testors Model master acrylic Earth Red instead.


After I'm happy with the rust I switch to Polly-S dirt and spray the running gear, ladders, pilot, and running boards. I also gave the cab that I painted earlier with Light freight car red a misting to tone down and fade both the paint and the white lettering.

Next I switch to Grimey Black and give the engine a misting as a 'control coat' This tones down any 'over weathering' as well as the bright white lettering and the engine black that I painted the boiler and tender with. It's definitely got some miles on it now.


As for the roof. I dabbed Zinc Chromate primer (polly-s) on the roof until it almost covered the black, then I dry brushed Roof brown and my rust paint to make to nice and rusty. When I airbrushed the rust I blended the colors together a bit. The final touch was to put engine black back in the airbrush and spray a line across the roof to simulate ash and cinders falling.

So that's how I weathered the engine, using these paints:


While weathering the engine I also sprayed the trucks. I did two sets of trucks, first the HOn3 archbars:

Next a set of standard gauge passenger trucks:

I sort of like the standard gauge trucks a bit better. Maybe if I have narrowed the engine a bit it would look better with the narrow gauge trucks?