Canadian Boxcar ~ Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Ever since I attended a conference in Montreal (and brought back maple candy) Nathan has been a fan of Canada. So we decided to make a Canadian boxcar. We decided to repaint a boxcar from a Tomytec ED101 set. 4-wheel cars are easy for him to put on the track, and its kind of surplus in my collection anyway.

The sides were spraypainted a flat white base, and the ends brush painted red.

The next part was harder. Some cut out maple leaf stickers served temporarily while I figure out how to paint them:

The pinewood derby section of our local hobby store is full of patriotic stars and stripes decals, and I'm sure any hobby shop in Canada is full of Canadian flag and maple leaf decals, but we live in California and didn't want to have to order something and wait for them. So I printed out images of the Canadian flag (there's a good, high-resolution one on Wikipedia) onto a piece of paper with a strategically placed piece of Tamiya masking tape, and cut out the leaf.
I put one of these DIY stencils on each side of the car, and masked everything. Before putting on red paint, I spraypainted everything white again, and dried this, to hopefully make a seal around the cut-out edges.

I applied the red paint by dabbing with a relatively dry brush, to try to minimize paint creeping under the tape through capillary action. This all worked fairly well--just a little bit of leakage, mostly in the grooves between the molded boards.



A "just for fun" project is a good way to try out some new techniques.