Peter Plantec shared this tip about weathering roads, paint and rust on your model railroad layout:
There are several brands of alcohol based asphalt patch material used to mend roofs and gutters.
I found that I could dilute and pour it in a form made of strip wood to make a road bed.
Before it completely hardens you can rub in some talc and cut in cracks and divisions.
You can even carve scale bricks as the underlying old road bed. The surface looks remarkably real.
Also, I almost never paint anything. I gesso it and then add layers of alcohol stain (used for shoes.) I usually mix and dilute my own colors and then put them on in several uneven layers.
I have several moss green washes that I put on finished shingles to imply a little moss growing. If you have a cabin in the deep woods, dust the moss stain with fine white grout powder. It absorbs the color unevenly and looks exactly like lichen growing on the shingles. Works great.
I hate that fresh painted look, it kills scale. A nice washed out slightly uneven color really helps keep things in perspective. I’m always interested in finding new ways to achieve this.
For old metal and rust I discovered Instant Iron by Modern Options. It’s excellent for iron smoke stacks and works great as a coating on scale corrugated roofing. I drizzle Instant Rust down the pipes and roofs to get a nice aging effect. It takes about an hour, but the surface actually rusts.
The roof effect can be enhanced by dusting with different colors of grout powder while it’s still wet. When it’s dry I do an uneven wash of very diluted dark stain to get a more realistic look.
Okay my favorite way to make rusted iron culvert pipes, ancient smoke stacks etc. is to take aluminum tubing or wrap heavy aluminum foil around an appropriate sized bolt to get the correlated look. Then dip the end in Radio Shack printed circuit etchant.
Be careful, it’s nasty stuff and it eats away slowly at first then it goes like mad. A bonus is that this thins the tubing to almost scale thickness…i.e. very, very thin. It really helps drive home the illusion.
Once I have that eaten away look I either, paint it with Instant Iron and rust it, or I paint it black then treat it with Rustall…several coats. Sometimes it comes out too shiny, which also kills scale so I dust it with rust dust or dull coat it.
I hope this helps someone out there. -Peter Plantec
If you try this method of weathering, please share your results or additional thoughts in the comment area below.
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