So, I'm thinking of starting my first attempt at a kitbash, and it got me thinking about the process I should be using. Since I'm starting with a car that had been factory painted, should I make the cuts and other modifications (such as shaving off unwanted details) before stripping the paint, or afterward? I can see benefits to both. If I cut before removing the paint, I reduce the risk of damaging the body if the plastic becomes more brittle in the stripping process. If I cut afterward, I could perhaps see the areas and details I want to cut better without the thick paint concealing them. Any suggestions?
Depends on how much cutting and putting back together you need to do. If your cutting the car completely through like to add or take away the roof or the length you need to strip it first. Putting it back together, especially if you use a weld type glue such as Tamiya in the glass jar, won't give a good bond if paint chemicals are ineracting with the glue. Once you have a clean plastic to plastic weld you can prime it with a good primer like Tamiya and see where you might need more filler.
If you use superglue, which I have not had much success with on large projects, you might can get away with not stripping until done. But then you run the risk of whatever you strip it in ruining your carefully blended fill areas.
Steve B
I'm doing a bash project with some passenger cars. I stripped all the paint off first.
Making a streamliner sleeper that will match the Athearn 72' streamline cars.
Mike.
My You Tube
I don't think he's talking about any refabrication at all, just whether it's easier to see the progressive whittling away against a paint backdrop vs. the stripped plastic, or whether the chemical action on the plastic makes it easier or worse to do clean whittling, cutting, or shaving.
I can see merit to shaving off details etc while the car is still painted, if only because if you do gouge the surface surrounding the detail, which happens, then there is the nice chance that what you gouged is the paint and not the plastic.
However I'd also say that doing that kind of work while the model is still painted means you may find yourself doing some or even all of the work all over again once you're down to bare styrene.
I hope that your plastic is not made brittle by the paint removing process. I have had good luck with isopropyl alcohol as a stripper, helped by rubbing with an old toothbrush. But I work in HO and I understand it is the Kato N scale plastics that seem prone to becoming brittle. Or perhaps that is a problem that has been taken care of by Kato - I recall some horror stories in these forums by guys who destroyed an expensive Kato business car by stripping the paint because the plastic became so brittle it just crumbled away to bits.
Might I suggest something? Kitbashing is a skill and like any skill it takes practice. Ordinarily I would suggest getting the hang of kitbashing with a structure before rolling stock. But now that I think of it I started with a boxcar ....
But yes the idea of practice and perhaps practicing on a piece of real trainset junk if you have any - the shaving off of details and such, the cutting and fitting. I would not recommend learning skills on your "real" project car. I have long regretted learning some weathering techniques -- meaning, rather vividly learning what NOT to do -- on a somewhat collectible BevBel freight car.
One of the things you might learn from that practice is the answer to your question about when in the process the paint stripping should happen.
Dave Nelson
dknelson yes the idea of practice and perhaps practicing... - the shaving off of details and such, the cutting and fitting. I would not recommend learning skills on your "real" project car.
yes the idea of practice and perhaps practicing... - the shaving off of details and such, the cutting and fitting. I would not recommend learning skills on your "real" project car.
Thanks for the guidance. I do plan on practicing before moving on to bigger and better projects. I try to be a meticulous planner and I've been doing a lot of research on this - MR articles, YouTube videos, books, etc... and I still can't seem to arrive at a consensus which way would work best.
I use 90% isopropyl alcohol for paint stripping and I have not had much, if any trouble with embrittlement of the plastic. I don't worry about it. When shaving off molded on detail, the cut surface shows black. It's easer to see what I am doing when the car body is some nice bright factory color. After stripping, the car body shows black, and the cut details are now black on black, not all that easy to see. BTW, the cut-the-car-apart and glue it back together project is really heavy duty kitbashing. You might want to try a few simplier kit bashes first to sort of get your hand in. Replacing molded on grabs with wire grabs, adding brake rigging, using DullCote to kill the high gloss on trainset cars, using dark gray auto primer on tarpaper roofs and under carriages, painting truck side frames red auto primer and brush painting the wheel faces grimy black for friction bearing cars or earth tone for roller bearing trucks, putting interiors and passengers into passenger cars, adding lights, converting from truck mount to body mount couplers, and stripping and repainting to a new road name of your choice. And roadtesting the kit bash after you get it finished.
David Starr www.newsnorthwoods.blogspot.com
The best tool I have found for removing grabs on anything is the Mission Models Micro Chisel with the 2mm chisel. Way better than the Xacto method. It gives you very precise control and it allows you to get into tight areas without marring nearby details. Well worth the price.
Also I think most of the fragile plastic came from the days of using brake fluid to remove paint. I experianced the same thing on a Kato with brake fluid. Quit using it years ago for that reason.
I generally prefer to strip the paint first, although I do remove most add-on parts, such as moveable doors on boxcars and any hardware associated with them that's not moulded as part of the main shell. Different paints may require different strippers. I had always used methyl hydrate, which worked on all Athearn Blue Box, Model Die Casting, Varney, Tyco, etc. rolling stock and locos. It also worked on most Train Miniature cars, although I had a couple boxcars which developed longitudinal cracks in one side after stripping with methyl hydrate. However, it doesn't work all that well with some more recent paint types, and for those, I've found that Super Clean is a good choice. It also works on brass models, as does lacquer thinner for the latter.I have used brake fluid on some older paints which didn't respond to the usual strippers, but found that it can damage some types of plastic...it completely deformed an Atlas RS-4 body shell to an unrecognisable mess.
I generally prefer to do kitbashing in multiples, whether it's a number of similar cars all getting the same modifications, or disparate types getting various changes. Offhand, I can think of only two cars on my layout that have had no modifiations other than the application of a little weathering.
Here are some cars already kitbashed and ready for painting...
This is one of 8 Athearn boxcars which I modified...
All that's left of the original car is the sides, and they've been lowered by the removal of of 6"(HO) of material from below the cars eaves - the original rivet battens at the eaves were then re-applied to the lowered sides.The Viking roofs are from Des Plaines Hobbies, the doors from Bowser, the ends from Tichy, and floors and underbodies from Central Valley. Oh, yeah, and the trucks are from Walthers.
I have dozens of modified Train Miniature cars, some just tidied-up with a few details and new paint and lettering...
...and some with some more obvious alterations...
...and a few that have been modified in a not immediately recogniseable way...
In addition to the details such as grabirons and brake gear, the car's diagonal bracing has been change from that of one representing a Howe truss, to the style of a Pratt truss, thus better-matching a photo of the real car.
The ends of the car are scratchbuilt, replacing the original Dreadnaught-style ends...
You can, of course, kitbash locomotives, too, as I've done with pretty-well all of mine, as well as passenger cars, structures, vehicles, etc., etc.
Rather than bore everybody with more photos, as is my usual practice, here are some links to some kitbashes/scratchbuilds...
2-6-6-2
freight cars
freight car scratchbuild
more freight cars
doodlebug upgrade
lots of freight cars
steam locomotive
roundhouse
Athearn rotary plow
overhead crane
brass steam locomotive
kitbashed roundhouse
steam locos
boxcar upgrades
lots more freight cars
kitbashed structure
steam loco kitbash
Wayne
Amazing work Wayne. Thank you for sharing your skills and knowledge with us. It is truly appreciated. Model Railroading is a hobby I wish I could have got into as a kid, but now that I'm in my early 50's, I think it's something I'll really enjoy once I hit retirement. There are so many aspects to the hobby to enjoy.
I would love to know more about prototypical freight cars and rolling stock. It's a subject I need to get into researching more. I would like to first get some more info from you guys about kitbashing in general.
What kind of supplies do you keep on hand for kitbashing rolling stock? I figure the obvious couplers, trucks, wheelsets. What about any certain styrene thickness, wire for grab/hand rails, etc?
I have found If you are patient, you can find rolling stock (often in lots) for very cheap. Its a good way to keep me busy when I can't do other layout stuff.
Ed
Semi newbie HO scale modeler coming from the O scale world
mrrdadWhat kind of supplies do you keep on hand for kitbashing rolling stock? I figure the obvious couplers, trucks, wheelsets. What about any certain styrene thickness, wire for grab/hand rails, etc?
I realize you were likely aiming your question at Dr Wayne and I hope he weighs in as we can all learn from him.
Over the years I have purchased (and tried to organize) a variety of parts that would most likely be needed in freight car detailing and kitbashing: a variety of ends (Youngstown, Murphy, Dreadnaught, Improved Dreadnaught, PS-1, and so on), a variety of boxcar doors, stirrup steps (there are several kinds and the days of being satisfied with the old Walthers collection of various sizes of metal staples are mostly over), various sorts of grab irons (straight, drop, corner, caboose, etc), nut-bolt-washer castings, airbrake hoses, coupler lift bars and levers, AB airbrake parts, different kits of running boards and brake wheels -- all things that experience has shown I might suddenly want during a project.
The key phrase there is "experience has shown." You could drop a lot of good money buying parts that in the end might not be needed in your projects until you get a feel for what the cars in your era most often needed and used. My sources for that information have been various Railway Prototype Cyclopedias (expensive but invaluable info), older copies of Mainline Modeler, Prototype Modeler, Model Railroading, Rail Model Journal, all commonly seen at swap meets, and Jeff Wilson's books for Kalmbach on freight cars, at least one of which is no longer in print.
Brands include Cal-Scale, A Line, Tichy, Kadee, Atlas, Detail Associates, Accurail, Detail Associates, and some lines of very good parts that are no longer available, alas, or the manufacturer has disappeared.
I also have a large supply of various sizes of styrene sheet and shapes (I was able to purchase an entire Plastruct "point of purchase" display from a hobby shop that was going out of business, and a large Evergreen styrene selection from another hobby shop that failed and sold off its stuff in an auction).
My practice involves buying before actual need, but it isn't just random buying. Also I have learned that when it comes to detail parts, he who hesitates is lost (or might be lost). Walthers for example has greatly cut back on the detail parts it stocks or catalogs which is a darn shame. On the other hand they can hardly be expected to carry shelves of parts that just sit there waiting for the day when I need a $2.79 bag of grab irons.
First off, I want to apologise for the (probable) loss of photos in the links which I offered earlier. While some of them may be there as attachments, most are from photobucket, which is currently experiencing technical difficulties, and are not currently available. I'll post here when that problem has been rectified, as photos usually offer a much better explanation of how something was done than a long written-out treatise on the construction.
Dave's post shows good examples of the kind of things that you may wish to have on-hand for kitbashing projects. You don't mention the era which you plan to model, but the parts you'd want to have on hand would depend somewhat on that. For example, I'm modelling the late '30s, so the various ends that Dave listed would all be suitable for my needs, with the exception of those for the PS-1 cars.I have a large collection of Evergreen products, both strip and sheet material, in a variety of sizes, thicknesses, and styles, but I also buy .060" sheets of styrene in 4'x8' form. It's good for kitbashing structures, but also for use as sub-bases for scratchbuilt rolling stock, and is much cheaper than buying the smaller sheets normally offered for hobby uses. Over the years, I've gone through at least 4 or 5 sheets.
Another useful resource is wire. I buy phosphor-bronze wire from Tichy, in a variety of diameters, and usually in reasonably large quantities. It's useful for brake rigging, and for forming grabirons in styles or sizes which are not otherwise available. It's also useful for piping on steam locomotives.The things that you're kitbashing or scratchbuilding will dictate the supplies you'll want to keep on-hand, and you'll soon learn which ones will be needed in larger quantities. I kitbash rolling stock (freight and passenger), along with locomotives (usually steam, but at one time also diesels), and structures, and also scratchbuild the same when that appears to be the better method, although I don't bother scratchbuilding parts when there's an affordable ready-to-use item that will serve the intended purpose. I don't model for contests, so am not constrained by the regulations those often have. I model for my own enjoyment (and for friends who need something that's not otherwise available).I have a fairly good collection of books regarding freight cars in my era, and if you're modelling a similar era (or perhaps up to the mid-'50s), you can find some very useful books HERE.
Also era-dependent would be books on locomotives. For steam locos, a good starting point would be Kalmbach's Steam Locomotives Cyclopædia Vol. 1. I don't know if it's still available new, but you may be able to find a copy at a used-bookstore. I found mine, used, at a train show.Another useful, but perhaps more technical, source of info, is the NMRA re-print of the 1925 Locomotive Cyclopædia, again at a used-book outlet or at a train show.
There are also a lot of on-line sources with photos of rolling stock and locomotives from all eras, and it's easy to save copies in a file on your computer. If you happen on a site with a large collection of useful photos, simply "bookmark" it for easy access anytime.
doctorwayneWhile some of them may be there as attachments, most are from photobucket, which is currently experiencing technical difficulties, and are not currently available.
It's going on 4 days now. Mine are gone.
It will be interesting to see what happens if and when they get things up again.
Back to kitbashing/scratch buildings cars.
My photobucket pictures are back, and I hope that those of others have returned, too.
The list of links, which I posted here earlier, should all have their pictures available now.
@doctorwayne
I may have to kitbash a Walthers Pier Terminal bldg (cut off a side or whatever) ?? Any suggestions/hints would be welcomed.
http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/11/t/278945.aspx
Brian
My Layout Plan
Interesting new Plan Consideration
doctorwayneMy photobucket pictures are back, and I hope that those of others have returned, too.
Nope. That should cover it.
railandsail @doctorwayne I may have to kitbash a Walthers Pier Terminal bldg (cut off a side or whatever) ?? Any suggestions/hints would be welcomed. http://cs.trains.com/mrr/f/11/t/278945.aspx
I'm aware of that structure, Brian, but am not sure of what you want to do with it. You can alter it to change its appearance, or make it into a low-relief background structure, or make it larger by altering the long walls and then splicing them together, with a new back made from sheet styrene - on the part of the layout shown in your link, that blank wall would likely face the aisle, although you could also omit that wall and model the interior of the structure.
There are quite a few views of that particular kit to be found HERE
mbinsewi doctorwayne My photobucket pictures are back, and I hope that those of others have returned, too. Mike.
doctorwayne
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All well and good Wayne, but, still waiting.
I have a paid account.