Skip two my Lou

A dreadful play on words, for which I’m deeply sorry.

Two of my Binnie skips have been at my novice weathering hands over the past couple of days and though not perfect, for some first efforts at serious weathering in any scale I think they pass muster. 

A couple of my Binnie skips are now looking well worn

Even though I have discovered pictures of new, almost pristine Hudson skips. The real things spent the vast majority of their lives in battered conditions. (I’ll bet that there isn’t even a clean one in preservation, he said hoping to be proved wrong). So I needed to model a couple of them after some years of hard work. 

Both wagons started off the same, assembled per the simple instructions as befits such a simple piece of rolling stock. This was followed by a spraying of a red oxide paint. They sat in that condition for many a month, waiting for inspiration to hit me. For some reason inspiration hit me a few days ago.

The first thing I did was give them a washing over with my favourite paint. DecoArt “Asphaltum”.

My favourite paint

It’s an Acrylic paint I found in my wife’s collection for her ceramics projects. She used it, (note the past tense) for dirtying things up. So that’s what I used it for. Oh my Lord. What a weapon this paint is. Just a thin wash over a painted item kills stone dead, any sheen in whatever colour you apply it to. When I first started using it many years ago, I dry brushed it on axle boxes and loco underframes for a little basic road grime. But as time went on I started using it more and more. I have even used it as a base colour for scenery in places. 

So I attacked the skips. The wash was applied pretty unevenly, thicker in some places than others. As I was adding other colours to it,  I erred on the side of caution and kept it simple. I could always add more colour, but removing it might be difficult.

Before the Ashphaltum wash

Afterwards. The sheen has gone.

Rusting is a subjective thing. What you, personally, might think is right, someone else might say that’s wrong. So for these first steps I went with what I myself was happy with. I used a bright Orange acrylic I had in stock. A cheapy from Target, from their ‘Mondo Llama” children’s range. Zesty Orange. I brushed it on where I thought rust and rusty streaks would form. If I didn’t like anything, I just smeared it off with my finger. The Asphaltum wash underneath killed the colour and added another tone to the base.

 As I say, overall the effect pleases me. I need to do a little fettling and fine tuning with some rust streaks. But it looks like a rusty, well used wagon to me and as it will spend time on the layout filled with rock and stone. It’ll be perfectly fine. One piece of advice that was passed on to me through my Facebook page was to ‘beat up” the edges. This was achieved by softening the skip over a flame and then bending and tweaking it with a pair of pliers. After a touch up with paint, the final result really pleased me, 

One of those days when I impress myself with what I can do

One down, one to go. 

From the earliest days of this concept. I really wanted one of the skips to be derelict and form a little vignette on the layout. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the best way to represent this would be by having a big hole in the skip itself. This was achieved with a reamer bit in my Dremel. Of course, the model skip is far thicker than the real thing, but I managed to hide that thickness when it was placed on the layout, as I added weeds growing out and around it. I used a new product to me from Woodland Scenics. Something called “Briar Patch”. It looks to be just smaller pieces of fine leaf foliage. It certainly helps create the right impression.

Left to rot

There we go, another footstep on my 16mm scale journey. A footstep that I am more than happy with. I am reminded of what I wrote in my on my panel track building in issue 127 of Narrow Gauge and Industrial Railway Modelling Review. 

“If I ever find myself doubting my abilities, all I need to do is pull out <my original section of track>, take a good look, and remind myself of what I can do when I put my mind to it.” 

You can do it too. Just put your mind to it.