Another Rock Island GP18 #1351

Well it's been two weeks since my knee surgery and things are progressing well.  

As mentioned in my last post, while I had the mill out I decided to get a few more Atlas GP chassis prepped for the rest of my GP18 fleet, 5 total.   The two Red and Yellow 18's are ready to have chips installed and programmed and I still need to get MTL couplers installed.  Then they'll at least be serviceable for the next session. 

The next GP18 I worked on is one that always caught my eye.

Not sure of the whole story behind this one?  It wasn't a wreck rebuild.  I read somewhere that the shops must have had some extra yellow paint laying around and needed to use it up?  Either way is it a sharp looking unit that I've been wanting to add to my fleet mainly because it adds to the Character of the Rock Island in my eyes.

I didn't need to do too much customization to this unit other than add the flared arrestors, a firecracker antenna, cab shades, new cab numbers, number boards and then I needed to fabricate the air filter on the top.

This was done with a few scraps of styrene.

Not perfect, but it gets the idea across.

Then I added some small scraps of extruded screen to the flared arrestors.

Before I painted the yellow or started on the weathering, because I was not able to remove the glazing, I used some liquid mask to cover the windows and headlights on both ends.  The last bottle I bought was dried up so I tried some Humbrol Maskol this time.  This stuff worked very well!  

As I did on the ICG units, I used primarily Pan Pastels for the weathering medium.  I also used some P3 Armor Wash to darken the grilles and to make the dark stain under the rear intake grille.  I was able to get crisper lines with the P3.

As I was afraid of, the Pan Pastels did dissipate a little after I sprayed the first coat of Dull Coat on the unit to seal it.  I went back over the model with a bit heavier coat of Pastels then reshot the Dull Coat.  This seemed to help but I wondered if I had not gotten a thick enough or rough enough coat of the Dull Coat to help hold the Pastels in the first place?  Another thing I did was to mist several light coats on and let them dry before spraying a heavier sealer coat to protect the weathering.  It seemed to work?

In this shot I grabbed an Intermountain F7A that was originally built by flight2000 (Brian K).  He built this F7 for a customer in Germany who later sold it on eBay and I was lucky enough to score it.

Three GP18's down, 2 to go...