Quarry Hunslet: The Crimson Horror

So, as you may have seen from my rather brief previous post, painting the main body colour of the locomotive did not at all go to plan. Fortunately it was possible to rescue the situation as you can see from todays photo.

Here in Yorkshire we haven't had much sun today which explains why the colour looks way brighter than it really is (the camera over compensating for the terrible light). In reality I've painted it using Humbrol acrylic #20 "crimson", which is quite a dark red. There are a number of areas that need touching up but in general the main areas are perfect.

Now you've seen that the situation was recoverable, let's back up and see how I ended up in quite such a mess. After painting the cab controls (which I'll come back to in a later post) I carefully masked up the inside of the cab while it was still separate from the body and then glued it into place. I then masked up the rest of the model (using the excellent Tamiya masking tape). I also used some Humbrol maskol at the edges of the tape, or where it was difficult to line up the tape properly, including around the cab windows. I then sprayed on the Humbrol crimson paint.

My first mistake was to use too much paint. Paul had warned me that red in particular is quite translucent and so benefits from a white primer. In fact this red paint was so translucent that I could see the white primer through it in places. To stop the white showing through I had to add more paint. Once the paint was dry (or at least I thought it was) I noticed that it appeared to have run on one of the cab side panels. It was annoying but I could probably have lived with that. What I couldn't live with was what happened next.

Now I don't know quite what the problem was but as I removed the maskol I'd used around the windows it pulled off the top layer of paint leaving just the primer behind. If this wasn't bad enough as I tried to remove the masking tape from inside the cab I popped one of the side panels loose. Finally when trying to remove the masking tape from the chimney it simply fell off. At this point I was not a happy bunny and certainly not relishing the thought of repainting. One of the main problems was that I wouldn't be able to mask things up in the same way now the cab was (mostly) attached to the footplate, so I decided to brush paint instead of spraying.

Before I could repaint I had to finish removing the old paint which given it was all on a metal surface came off quite easily with the aid of cotton wool buds, nail polish remover and blunted cocktail sticks. I did have to replace the rivet transfers though as they came off with the paint. So once everything was nicely cleaned up I brushed on Humbrol acrylic grey primer and left it to dry. To say it was streaky was a bit of an understatement but I decided I'd continue on and brush on the top coat; still Humbrol acrylic crimson, but from a small pot. This was definitely not a wise move. It turns out that none of the Humbrol acrylic paints brush on well; I suppose they might if diluted, but then I'd probably have the same translucent problem. By this stage it was looking pretty horrible, so I started to strip the paint off for a second time.

Once the paint was cleaned off for a second time, I again masked the black areas and the inside of the cab as well as I could and sprayed on the primer. This time I went for a red oxide primer in the hope that even if the crimson was slightly translucent it wouldn't show up. The primer went on well, so I then sprayed the crimson again, being careful to use as little paint as possible. After leaving it to dry over night I carefully removed the masking tape and this time everything went to plan. Not only did the paint stay attached but I hadn't ruined the cab interior either.

So I now have some tidying up to do (the edge of the cab roof for instance), and then I can finish painting in the details.