Conrail's Amoskeag Northern Line | Weathering with Sophisticated Finishes Rust Kit

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Weathering with Sophisticated Finishes Rust Kit

Written by Ian MacMillan

Tuesday, 16 October 2007

Sophisticated Finishes Rust Kit

I'm a fan of well weathered, and grafiti covered freight cars. I layout that is realistily detailed loses all its credibility if all the rolling stock looks like they are right out of the box. For that reason, before any piece if rolling stock goes into service on the layout it will receive some sort of weathering. I'm constantly hanging around weathering forums to see what others are using for tecniques and I recently came across a person who had tried out a rusting kit from Sophisticated Finishes. This kit is designed to instantly age anything that can be painted with the iron base included in the kit.

While the images posed from the member were of his very first attempt at weathering, I was not too overly impressed with the outcome as the rust was one consistant color, but decided I would give the product a try. I purchased a starter kit at Michaels for $9.99 containing the iron base paint, and the activator. You can also purchase the two items separately incase you run out of one and have plenty of the other. The bottles contain 2oz each, which appears that it will last for many weathering projects.

Nice, varied tones

I decided to test my experiment out on an older Athearn bluebox B&M boxcar. While yes the rusing is exaggerated on this car, I wanted to fully test out what I could do with this product. Begin by applying the iron base to where you want the rust to be, and allow it to fully dry. The iron base is about the same thickness as craft acrylic paints, so I tried to get it on as thin as possible. After the iron base was dry to the touch, I used a separate brush to apply a single coating of the activator, and let dry. After about 4 hours I checked on the car to check its progress, and added additional coats as desired. I found that a single coating produced a generally all the same color rust on the entire roof. I was happy to find that additional coatings helped to make the rust look more varied.

That is pretty much it, easy huh? I'm told that if exposed to air the rust will continue to rust, so you will need to seal it with Dulcote.

Real rust

I am also experimenting with the iron base and its thickness. I'm going to attempt to see if it can be made into a wash, or even airbrushed and still work effectively. If it could be turned into a wash and work well, I may have finally found a way to realisticly recreate the rusty truss bridges on the Maine Central Mountain Division in New Hampshire!

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