John,
After failing many attempts to duplicate the elusive quality of that "color" I
gave up and decided to call Scalecoat and enlist their help. Surprise !! The
chemist I talked to happened to have been a former Southern Ry. employee. He
also happened to have worked in the shops at Asheville. One of his jobs was to
mix paint and one of these paints happened to be IMITATION ALUMINUM. On Sou.
Ry. Diesels the stripe on the lower part of the carbody was the same paint as
the Q gray backs.
He stated that the highly complex "mixing" of this color consisted of taking a
55 gal. barrel of "STANDARD RR WHITE" and adding a "block" of painters aluminum
pigment. After breaking up the block of pigment he dropped it in the barrel,
started the electric mixer and went home. The next day he had 55 gal. of DuPont
Imitation Aluminum.
With the exception of the problems associated with keeping the aluminum paint
in suspension in the white paint the results have been quite pleasing and
accurate. "Accurate", of course, is subjective. Combine this with the
difficulty of getting an F3 or F7 into your basement to compare the real thing
to the model under the quality of the light in your RR room. Easier, perhaps,
would be to take the model out into actual sunlight for comparison.
Anyway, I have been told that this blend of Scalecoat paint looks very close to
the Q units which is what I was after to begin with.
Karl
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