4400 "Washboard" M. U. Cars Part 3

Paint

The delivery paint scheme with green ends as seen in the 1957 photo at Danbury in part 1 was picked for this model.

The bare body shell was sanded smooth to a fine 400 grit wet/dry sandpaper. Sanding the stainless side fluting is difficult without distorting the fidelity of the flutes, this was made as smooth as possible with a maroon 320 grit Scotch-Brite flexible sanding pad.

The shell was primed with Alclad II black primer with micro filler, the shell was re-sanded again with 600 grit paper and the flutes were sanded with a light grey 800 grit Scotch-Brite pad.

The roof was painted acrylic grimy black. The ends were painted New Haven 401 green with Accu-paint.

I had never tried Alclad II metal finishes before but decided to give it a try on the stainless side fluting. I had read on the net somewhere before that chrome was the best choice to represent stainless steel so I decided to try that.

Alclad is a two step process, first coat is their gloss black lacquer base coat, after drying followed by the chrome lacquer coats.

I was actually amazed it does look like chrome plating as seen below, to shiny for stainless though.

To dull it down some, a mixture coat of  1/3 dullcoat 2/3 glosscoat lacquer was applied over the chrome, see below.

I am happy with the result on the fluting, but I would try the stainless steel paint next time. I will use the chrome when vehicle modeling going forward.

A light coat of chrome was also applied to the outside of the corner steps. To help mask the white of the paper that the step risers are printed on, a very light coat of chrome was over-sprayed but not enough to obscure the printed "holes". The letter and number boards are separate pieces of .005 styrene, they are painted a cream color to try and match the prototype. These appear more white in the photos than they actually are because of the lighting used to take the photo. There are no interior details, the window shades are a print out from Rapido.

Below is a new 4400 washboard.

MU cables, air hoses and a few extra details added as per prototype. Need to find some small decal numbers to fit in the number boards next to the vestibule doors and add some weathering to finish.

I am happy with the final model, it was a needed prototype for the layout. The car runs great with just a base non sound decoder.