This post describes how I renumbered the second of my two Athearn/Bev-Bel Red TP&W covered hoppers from 18175 to 18177. Removing the factory numbers was a bit of an adventure, as it always seems to be for me, anyway. There are many techniques for removing factory-applied numbers and it takes some experimenting to find out which one will work for a particular car.
Accurail's FAQ notes that they use pad printing to letter their cars and that Mr. Color thinner works well to remove the lettering without damaging the paint. Reasoning that a similar printing method might have been used on my older Athearn/Bev-Bel car, I got a bottle of Mr. Color thinner to try. This is a lacquer thinner so I worked in my spray booth.
I first experimented on an old Athearn reefer that I've been cannibalizing for parts. A Q-tip moistened with thinner and some gentle rubbing worked very well to remove the Athearn lettering with minimal damage to the paint. I found the Q-tip a bit too large for my liking, so I bought some microbrushes and those worked better. Emboldened by this success, I set to work on one of the end numbers on the TP&W hopper.
My fatal mistake here was to simply assume that Athearn and Bev-Bel used similar paint and not test the thinner on the painted inside of the car first. The Bev-Bel paint dissolved almost immediately on contact with the Mr. Color thinner, leaving me with nice bare black plastic where the number used to be. Lesson learned for next time: always test solvents on an unseen part of the car first!
For the other end of the car, I tried wet-sanding the number with 1000-grit sandpaper. This worked reasonably well but I found it a bit difficult to focus the sanding action exactly where I wanted it, even when using a small homemade sanding stick. The picture below shows the result of the sanding method. The paint survived mostly intact but there is a little bit of black plastic showing through in a couple of places.
I've seen many articles and videos about how to use decal solvents to soften and remove lettering. The basic method is to cut a small piece of paper towel or tissue to cover the unwanted lettering, saturate the paper towel with decal solvent, let it soak for 5 to 20 minutes, and then remove the softened lettering. In some cases you can apparently peel off the softened numbers whole with tape, but I've never gotten that to work. I tried the soak method on the sides of the Bev-Bel car with both Microscale Micro-Sol and Walthers Solvaset and neither solvent softened the lettering enough to make it come off easily. I ended up (1) soaking the number with a paper towel and Micro-Sol for 5 minutes, (2) covering the number in a pool of Micro-Sol after removing the paper towel, and (3) gently scraping off the number with the tip of my knife, reapplying Micro-Sol as necessary to keep it wet. This method succeeded in getting the number off, but as shown on the image below, the paint was damaged enough to make it obvious that there used to be a "5" there.
Some paint touch-up was in order prior to applying the new number decals. I primed the bare spot on the A end of the car with Vallejo gray primer prior to painting. Vallejo paints dry to a flat finish but I want to apply decals on a glossy surface. My favorite thing about Scalecoat II was that it dried to a gloss finish so I didn't need to apply a gloss clear coat prior to decaling. Vallejo makes both gloss medium (70.470) and gloss varnish (70.510), and I decided to experiment with trying to mix a Vallejo paint that would dry glossy. The gloss medium proved to be the better choice here, as it is intended to be mixed in with the paint. The pure gloss varnish is very glossy but a mix of paint and gloss varnish didn't dry glossy in my experiments. I found that I needed to add quite a bit of gloss medium to get a sheen on the dried paint. I ended up adding gloss medium to my paint in a ratio of 2 parts paint to 1 part gloss medium. The 2:1 mix resulted in a satin finish, at best, but shiny enough for my purposes. The paint mix is the same one I used for the underbodies: 4 parts 71.003 Red to 1 part 71.086 Light Red. This mix dried a bit redder than the factory paint but close enough for me.
I masked off the entire car except for the immediate areas around the removed numbers. In the past when I've tried to use four pieces of tape to mask off a rectangular area, I've had trouble avoiding bleed-under where the pieces of tape overlap. To avoid that this time, I cut small windows out of single pieces of tape. It took a few light coats with the airbrush to get a shiny finish.
The new numbers came from Herald King set H-431, which is long out of production but I was able to find one on eBay.
I decided to renumber the car to 18177 mainly to avoid having to individually cut out and apply the small end numbers; the decal set has groups of end numbers ready to go for 18177. The 7's for the sides are a slightly different font on the decal set than the factory numbers but not different enough for me to want to deal with the end numbers individually. As shown in the first picture below, I gently wedged the car in the top center drawer of my desk to hold it steady for applying the end numbers.
The final step was to apply a flat clear coat. I used Vallejo matte varnish (70.520), thinned 3 parts varnish to 1 part thinner. This was my first experience with the Vallejo varnish and I had a good experience with it. I was especially impressed at how well a thin airbrushed coat leveled itself on the model.
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| The finished TPW 18177, ready for service |
