As a matter of fact, paints are always tricky when it's time to choose a color. By mistake, I sprayed the first car with True Line CN Grey No. 11 only to discover is was too far off and didn't even match my other True Line hoppers! Maybe the color is right, but it seems to be far to greenish. But the mistake didn't end there. CN indeed changed it's hopper color to Grey No. 12 in the late 60s, exactly when the Procor cars were built.
A quick search in local and online hobby shops yielded poor results and I had to make my own mix. As I often hear from my older architect colleagues "a good painter should be able to eyeball any color". Well, I guess that's true. In my case, seeking the perfect color was trivial since the cars will be heavily discolored and weathered per prototype. Thus, it was much more important to blend the color with the existing similar cars in my fleet.
In fact, getting the mix right took about 1 minutes. A lot of white, a sizeable amount of Tamiya German Grey XF-63 and a bit of Tamiya Flat Flesh XF-15 yielded quickly a satisfying mix. The color was tested on a prepainted Intermountain car until a perfect match was achieved. In a matter of a few minutes, the three cars were covered in a nice coat of warm grey paint. Later, a coat of Future gave them a nice glossy finish for decalling, which I hope will occur during the weekend when the paint will have cured.
When completed, this will bring the Procor fleet to 9 cars. Add to this 2 Intermountain cylindrical hoppers, 12 Rapido new cylindrical hoppers and we've got enough car to serve the cement plant. Meanwhile, the slabside hoppers will be phased out when the Rapido cars will be available next fall. By the mid-80s, none of them served the plant anymore. However, they could be extremely useful if we want to backdate the layout a little bit.
Matthieu
ReplyDeleteAs I model rail activity in the very southwestern portion of Virginia in 1959 my home, the Clinch Valley lines, is strongly influenced by the Clinchfield and what it was in that era----and their warm grey colored engines. Not an easy color to duplicate. Thus your combo of white and Tanzer grey made sense but the dash of flat flesh really surprised me. I'll follow your recipe hoping to get comparable results. Many thanks. Roger
Roger, yes, it sounds completely counter intuitive, but using yellow wouldn't work, red would give a pinkish results and brown wouldn't work either by making the grey color dirty. Thus, flat flesh combined the advantage of the aforementioned colors without their associated problems. It's a matter of finding the right ratio for your purpose.
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