Advise needed :Painting Green Southern F Units

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I am looking for good advise on modeling Southern F units such as how to mask the nose, templates, whether to paint the Green or the Antique Aluminum first. Whether to tape or liquid mask and how to obtain prototypical symetry.Any help from sucessfull modelers would be greatly appreciated.

-- Roy Williams (sluggo47@bellsouth.net), March 17, 2000

Answers

I can't help with masking tips, but I've always been told to paint your lightest colors first.

-- Matt Bumgarner (stealthnfo@aol.com), March 17, 2000.

Roy--first paint them imitation aluminum. Next make a xerox copy of the decal stripes and cut it out leaving the part that would be imitation aluminum solid--this is the master. Now lay out some wide masking tape on a piece of glass or plexiglass and tape the master on top of it. Use a sharp exacto blade to trace along the edge of the cutout--this will create one side of the mask. Repeat this step but flip the master over to make a mirror image on the tape. Lift the masing tape from the glass and apply to the model. Fill in the other areas with masking tape. Also put pieces of masking tape behind the headlight opening to prevent paint from blowingthrough onto the imitation aluminum. Now hit it with the green and finish with the decals. I showed how to do this in my FT article in the Nov. 97 issue of Model Railroading magazine.

-- Larry Puckett (ljpuckett@msn.com), March 18, 2000.

To get perectly matched sides for the nose area, I place masking tape on both sides(front and back) to a piece of wax paper, then I trace and cut as he described above, but you are now cutting both sides at the same time. Leave a tab of wax paper on the inside end, to hold on to while you peel away the tape. Good luck!

-- Chris Howard (chrreg@tricomp.net), April 25, 2000.

I just purchased Southern F7 A and B unit from Athern. They look good, better than I could do.

-- Stevan Boyd (Stevanboyd@juno.com), February 18, 2001.

I did a quartet of Model Power E-8's a while back. I used the Microscale decals to make a pattern for the paint separation but could never get the decals to go on. I ended up using Champ gold stripes (not yellow-gold). I did the nose first aligning the middle of the top horizontal part of the stripe first. Then using a toothpick and brush dabbed on some solvaset and slowly worked around the curves. It took a while: dab of solvaset, let it soften the film, push it into place, add another drop and so on. Came out perfect. It took a lot of gentle nudging to get the curves to conform to where the paint separations were. For the bottom I simply laid them out, sighting down the side of the unit to keep them straight, then hitting it with the solvaset. I think the Champ decals worked better for the stripes because they are heavier film than Microscale and can take a lot of extra nudging around. A gloss finish is a must before decaling otherwise you will have a lot of silverly air pockets showing. I used Scalecoat Southern Green and Pactra light artillery gray (which was close to the weathered aluminum I checked paint chips on.)

-- Bob Ayers (rrayers@hotmail.com), June 04, 2003.


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