Decaling—Changing the Number on a Boxcar
Gerry LeoneDescription
Gerry Leone, Master Model Railroader at the National Model Railroad Association, shows how to change the numbers on the side of a manufacturer car in this video. The first thing to do is remove the existing number from the car. Modelers have found many different ways to do just that. Methods depend on the manufacturer as well as on the type of ink, decal, or paint they have used to number or letter the cars.
Modelers have used Soft Scrub with a Q-tip, using the abrasiveness to gently remove the decal. Rubbing alcohol also works, as do ink erasers available at art stores and MicroSol for some manufacturer cars. To renumber the car Gerry has in this video, he will use a sanding pad with a 2400 grit. The Sante Fe car has a preprinted number from the manufacturer. Gerry uses the sanding pad to gently erase that number by sanding it down. He folds the pad over and uses the smaller surface area created for precision. He advises to be patient, as this takes a bit of time. Be careful to not also remove the reporting marks or dimensional data.
The important aspect of sanding or any other method of decal removal is to not disturb the paint underneath the number of the car. To prevent this, don’t sand in one area for too long or too hard. Once the numbers are completely gone, he puts a gloss coat over it again with a floor wax and then lays down the new decal.
The manufacturer has supplied a decal sheet with many random numbers, so by cutting out a block of those numbers, he is able to create the new car number. Once the gloss coat is dry, he uses a Micro Set and Micro Sol combination to set it down over the rivet lines. He then applies several dull coats on the entire side of the car. This is how Gerry Leone creates unique numbers on his cars.
Now, what happens if you wanna just change the numbers on the side of a car that came from the manufacturer? Well let's just clean up a little bit of our mess here and get on with that. The first thing you'll wanna do, you'll need to do, is remove the existing number from the car. And modelers have found a whole lot of different ways to do that. And it depends on the manufacturer, it depends on what kind of ink or decal or paint they've used to number or letter their cars. Modelers have used Soft Scrub with a Q-tip to gently use the abrasion power of Soft Scrub to get rid of that paint. They've found that alcohol, rubbing alcohol, will work really well. They've found that an ink eraser, available at art stores, will work really well. Micro Sol will work in the cases of some manufacturers. But to renumber the car that we're doing today I'm going to use just my sanding pad again, and once again, this is a 2400 grit sanding pad. We've got a car here that came from the manufacturer. Pre-printed number on it. This is, again, another Santa Fe car. And what we'll wanna do is use the, I'm gonna use my sanding pad, and I wanna just get in there and very gently erase that number by sanding it down. So I'll fold this over and just be very, very patient. This takes a little bit of time. But you'll start to sand down that number. Just staying as close as you can to the numbers itself so that you don't erase the reporting marks or the dimensional data. And you can see that is starting to erase just fine. Now the important thing about sanding or any of these methods is you don't wanna disturb the paint underneath the number of the car, you just wanna get that number off it. So what you don't wanna do is sand in one spot too long or too hard and wind up by ruining the paint that's going to be underneath your new numbers. As I said, this takes a little bit of time but as you can see, just in the few seconds that I've been doing it here, it's coming off pretty quickly. In the end what you'll wind up by doing is once that's completely gone, we'll put some gloss coat over it again. In this case I used the floor wax again and laid down my decals. Once again the manufacturer has supplied a decal sheet that has a bunch of random numbers on it. So I was able to cut out a block of those numbers and just lay them down very nicely onto my gloss coat. Once those were dried and settled in there I used, again, Micro Set, Micro Sol, that whole combination of things, to get it to settle down over the rivet lines and then came by with my Delcoat and gave the side of the car several shots, quick shots, of Delcoat. And you can see, that turned out very, very nicely and you can't see the decal on it at all and it looks, for all the world, like it was printed that way and now I have a unique number for this car.
I wanted to watch this but for some reason it will not play on my tablet, I model in O scale and wanted to change some of the details on my Lionel Reefer wagons.
I would mask any areas that you don't want to accidently sand off