Hi All

I have been continuing to work on the Bachmann 108 and due to the unusually warm (for January) weather I have managed to get the weathering done.

My thoughts on weathering are as follows, always look at the real thing, work with the techniques not against them to get the effect you want, one technique on its own is not going to do everything and aim for it all to disappear!  This last one might be a bit odd but in the real world unless something is spectacularly dirty you shouldn’t really notice the weathering.  In my opinion if you show someone a model and you are not discussing the subject, if the first thing they say is nice weathering you might have over done it! (other methods and opinions are perfectly valid of course)

Its also wise to consider how something gets dirty and the way the environment it operates in affects it.  A rally car, splashing about in the mud will look splattered and heavily streaked – Trains don’t tend to do this.  There’s some fabulous books on weathering from Military modellers (FAQ are a personal favourite) but again a Panzer tank in desert colours will weather differently to a train.  Even trains don’t weather the same.  An American locomotive will often be a lot dustier than a UK one that sits in our wet weather a lot more.

Anyway enough waffle – here’s what I did!

Stage one – finish the painting stage – I used the maskol trick on the roof so some lighter grey showed through.  I have also used a thin wash of grey/brown for the dirt that collects in the door frames etc – I don’t want it spotless but I want it to look like its been cleaned.  Note that I haven’t touched the underframe yet except for painting the silver exhaust pipe brown.

Here I have airbrushed the underframe with my own concoction of track dust.  Think about the angle that the dust gets onto the underframe and spray it from a similar direction (from the side and below). Also do the inner ends while you are at it.  The roof has been sprayed with a mixture of gunmetal and black and while I had that colour in the airbrush I picked out some of the darker areas of the inderframe to.

The picture on the left is how the bogie looked after the Airbrush stage was finished – prototype pictures show a build up of grease on the bogie sides (as well as other areas of the underframe) and this was added by dry brushing.  Dry Brushing is one of those throwaway terms that people use but it doesn’t really tell you what it is.  Essentially its nothing more clever than using next to no paint so that it picks up the highlights.  By working the paint that you do have you can blend it into the existing colour but you don’t want an effect that’s as smooth as an airbrush will give you. I use neat gunmetal for this stage.  You can see the very subtle streaks on the lower body side.

There are some areas that are a bit more bunged up than most and for these i use black (again dry brushed) and sometimes a bit of Klear floor polish for the bits that look wet.  You don’t want to go mad with the Klear – just enough to give a glint now and then.  While you have the paints out you can use a cotton bud to ‘blob’ a bit of Gunmetal on the buffer heads to represent grease.

The finished result.  By looking at the real thing and using techniques that do the work for you there’s nothing difficult about it.  Sure there’s a large worry factor to taking your paints to a model if you haven’t done it before but you can always use a battered second hand model, a toy car or even a plastic tub to practise on first.

By the way I also finished off the 2 47s I was talking about earlier on the workbench.  Pictures of those are in the class 47 gallery.