ICG & YMV Cars Painted - 11-20-2015

Pulpwood Flat and Thrall Door Boxcars Painted

This morning I was able to do some painting in the new paint booth.  It has been almost five months since I applied primer to the first two Y&MV Thrall All-Door boxcars with unsatisfactory results.  It was this event that inspired me to build a paint booth for future painting.  

In the interim I have formulated the color for my brown Y&MV freight cars.  The formula is 75% Scalecoat II S2027 IC Orange and 25% Scalecoat II S2012 Tuscan Red.  Yes, I know that the Scalecoat brand is changing hands...we will have to wait and see what the future holds.

Since I would be painting with the IC Orange, I decided to first paint the Walthers 50' Seico Pulpwood Flat that I had primered with Joe Bohannon's Chinook Lines Gray straight orange.  I have already painted and decaled two of these cars ICG, and I have on-hand three more ICG pulpwood car decal sets.

After a thorough cleaning, my trusty Badger single action airbrush was ready for painting.

First I painted the boxcars upside down to get the under frame as well as the bottom of all of the raised details covered.  Then the shop trucks were applied and the cars painted upright. 

The IC orange layered smoothly over the Sherwin Williams primer that was applied six days earlier. Next it was time to mix the Y&MV brown.  I marked a bottle of paint with lines for the IC Orange and Tuscan Red fill levels with a sharpie.  This will be my standard bottle for mixing this particular color. Simple paint droppers were used to introduce the colors to the bottle.  There is ample room in the paint booth for this type of work which is convenient as the booth interior is a great place to have spills!

I had hoped that painting in a more controlled environment would allow the less-than-perfect primer coat on the Thrall-Door boxcars to remain.  As the final paint layer dries, it looks to me like the cars will be just fine!  Once the cars are decaled, gloss-coated, weathered, and clear-coated I am certain they will be sharp looking models. 

I am very pleased with my color selection for my Y&MV brown.  The shade of brown is very appealing! Using IC Orange as the base for this color subliminally ties this equipment in with IC/ICG orange equipment that will be roaming the rails of the Meridian Speedway with them.  Below are a couple of shots of these cars drying this evening:

Chris