Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Track Painting

While I was more than happy with my first attempt at track building clearly it needed painting as sleepers are never copper coloured and the rail is never that shiny.

The first job though was to fill the gaps I'd had to file in the sleepers and I did this using some perfect plastic putty from Deluxe Materials which was filed smooth once it had set. The rails were then given a good clean before I tried something new; metal black.

When I built Jerusalem I painted the rails but it wasn't exactly a success. I found that the paint wouldn't stick well to the rails and tended to flake off over time. This time I decided to try using a chemical to blacken the rails instead, specifically I'm using Carr's metal black for nickel silver which I picked up from C&L Finescale along with the track. The health warnings on the bottle were almost enough to put me off using it, but I gently applied it to the rail using cotton wool buds. I was amazed just how quickly it works, but you do have to make sure the rail is very clean as I found any bits that weren’t were impervious to the chemical and stayed shiny. Once I was happy with the colouring I then applied some Carr's Electrofix to seal everything. Electrofix has a misleading name in that it doesn't actually conduct electricity, so I then buffed the railtops using a coffee stirrer which removed the electrofix and some of the blackening to give a used look to the rails. The final step was to paint the sleepers which I did using RailMatch sleeper grime.

Amazingly after all that the rails still conduct power nicely and the locomotive still moves, and I think the whole thing looks much more convincing than the ready-to-run track I was using before.

7 comments:

  1. That is looking excellent Mark and is a huge improvement on the usual RTR products.

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    1. Thanks Geoff. I'm definitely convinced of the benefits now of building my own track and I certainly won't be going back to RTR for plain track. Points might be another issue though, I'll have to try building one and see if I can get it to work well.

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    2. Mark if you can file and solder then you can build your own points, it really is a lot easier than you might believe. Take your time and don't be tempted to cut corners when it comes to making the crossing. The big advantage of using PCB is that you can easily make adjustments should the need arise. I'm convinced that you can not only make points that look better but actually work better as well.

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    3. Given the hassle I've had in the past with RTR points I suppose even a badly hand built one might be a better long term bet! When I end up with a track plan where I need a point I'll give it a go.

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  2. This track looks great. The time when I can put doing this off grows ever shorter, you and Paul are an inspiration!

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    1. Certainly for plain track I won't be going back to the PECO stuff as it was much easier than I imagined to build this piece and it looks so much finer than the alternative. I'm still not sure about points or crossings yet, but we shall see.

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