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A question about painting small yellow panels


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Hello all. I'm sure this question has been asked a thousand times, but I'm looking for some advice on painting small yellow panels.

I've got a couple of locos in plain green, and ideally I'd like to add yellow panels without having to do complete resprays. 

What's the best approach for this? I've read that a white primer base, and thin as possible layers of yellow are ideal. Anyone have any experience they could share?

Cheers.

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13 minutes ago, PenrithBeacon said:

I have a Heljan Co-Bo which needs this treatment too. Is there an alternative to spraying, I wonder, perhaps using block transfer sheets?

I don't see why not.  I've found that the easiest way to put wasp stripes on a shunter, so cutting out a piece the right size from a sheet of plain yellow should be easier than trying to mask the rest of the body.

 

What I would like would be a way of removing the yellow end for a green diesel as I prefer the earlier livery.  

Trying to match the rest of the paintwork is not going to work, so that really is a job calling for respray.

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If you spray yellow over green it turns green! Hence the need to spray a grey or white undercoat first. There are 2 types of yellow panel one with rounded top corners and one with square corners depending on the works who painted the panels. So for instance the Class 24,s had both styles so you need to refer to photos. 
I use Tamiya masking tape to form a square rectangle and then cut a small piece of tape with a small radius to form the rounded corner.

 

David

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2 hours ago, Norton961 said:

If you spray yellow over green it turns green! Hence the need to spray a grey or white undercoat first. There are 2 types of yellow panel one with rounded top corners and one with square corners depending on the works who painted the panels. So for instance the Class 24,s had both styles so you need to refer to photos. 
I use Tamiya masking tape to form a square rectangle and then cut a small piece of tape with a small radius to form the rounded corner.

 

David

 

Thanks for the advice. Will be doing a 24 and a 31, funnily enough the 24 did have the rounded top corners, so that's going to be fun to attempt. The 31 is nice and easy, just a big ol' rectangle. I've got some Tamiya light grey primer lying around, should do the job? 

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  • RMweb Gold

The shade of yellow has changed over the years . Precision Paint’s signal yellow looks a pretty good match for the shade used in the 60s …..

C7CE2939-299A-4B4E-AD3A-A11F330F1517.jpeg

Edited by Phil Bullock
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5 hours ago, Phil Bullock said:

The shade of yellow has changed over the years . Precision Paint’s signal yellow looks a pretty good match for the shade used in the 60s …..

C7CE2939-299A-4B4E-AD3A-A11F330F1517.jpeg

 

Nice - after six years of watching Class 22s at work, D6336 was the last one I saw in action, at Truro, 31/12/71.........heavens, nearly half a century ago........they went extinct the following day.

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Two further questions. Any recommendations as to whether enamel or acrylic would suit the job better? I'd imagine enamel would probably be more ideal?

Also, unfortunately in New Zealand we have a very limited choice of paints, no railmatch or phoenix precision paints. Does anybody know a good colour match to the 60's yellow panel colour from the humbrol, tamiya or vallejo range?

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19 hours ago, Halvarras said:

 

Nice - after six years of watching Class 22s at work, D6336 was the last one I saw in action, at Truro, 31/12/71.........heavens, nearly half a century ago........they went extinct the following day.


Was one of the more travelled ones … whilst shedded at 81A ended up working a Paddington train from Oxford to Worcester following multiple failures of other locos…

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On 16/10/2021 at 00:17, thohurst said:

 

Thanks for the advice. Will be doing a 24 and a 31, funnily enough the 24 did have the rounded top corners, so that's going to be fun to attempt. The 31 is nice and easy, just a big ol' rectangle. I've got some Tamiya light grey primer lying around, should do the job? 

To save yourself much frustration,  use a white primer.  Yellow pigment has poor coverage and will require many light coats to be fully opaque on anything darker than white, that could result in obscured details

 

2 hours ago, thohurst said:

Two further questions. Any recommendations as to whether enamel or acrylic would suit the job better? I'd imagine enamel would probably be more ideal?

Also, unfortunately in New Zealand we have a very limited choice of paints, no railmatch or phoenix precision paints. Does anybody know a good colour match to the 60's yellow panel colour from the humbrol, tamiya or vallejo range?

Humbrol do a BR Yellow which you could use, with a little white mixed in, its only available as acrylic.

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3 hours ago, Monkersson said:

  Yellow pigment has poor coverage

 

It certainly does these days, but back in the 1960s/70s I used to use Humbrol No 8 gloss yellow which was fantastic. In 1970 I found a new green Tri-ang Hornby Class 37 hiding in plain sight in a toy shop (it was in a windowless square section box wrapped in yellow dimpled foam, but official TH red/yellow packaging, very odd), cost me sixty-seven shillings and sixpence! Being a fledgling modern image modeller it had to have full yellow ends and being somewhat impatient I achieved this with just ONE COAT of No 8!! OK, it built up a bit around the tail lights and lamp brackets but it didn't run. What the lead content was back then is anyone's guess, but enamel paint in general, and Humbrol in particular, appeared to stick to anything, and rarely needed more than two coats. In the 1970s I built MTK kits of Classes 25 & 46 in BR blue, and a Class 119 DMU with aluminium bodyshells in blue/grey, knew nothing about cleaning up and primers, and used sliced-up sellotape for masking :O! The slicing-up on a piece of Perspex partially killed the adhesive but even so, it should have gone badly wrong but never did. By the late 1970s No 8 had been replaced by another shade unsuitable for BR diesel ends so I switched to Precision Paints authentic colour, but I don't recall this needing more than three coats. Sadly not the case these days.

So I would also advocate using a white primer but if hand painting try to avoid a build-up against masking tape as it may show as a white pin stripe around the yellow panel.

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