painting road wheels

oneton,
First, let me welcome you to the forum family. Hope you enjoy your stay!

There are several methods that the forum members here like to use. My suggestion is to try a couple and see which ones you like best.

1. Use a "Sharpie" pen to paint your road wheels. If I'm not mistaken, in the last issue of FSM, this method was used to build the weekend T-34 project. Pretty quick and easy.

2. Use a circle template to paint your road wheels. You can paint the entire wheel and tire flat black, and then find the circle that fits the diameter of the wheel. Put that over your wheel/tire and spray the wheel portion. The template acts as a mask for the tire.

3. Paint the tire portion by hand after spraying the wheel. This can be time consuming, and leave brush strokes, as well as an uneven paint job.

4. Personnally, I like to paint the entire road wheel/tire flat black, then put my airbrush on a fine setting and then "dot-in" (kind of a polka-dot overlap) the base color on the wheel. This allows a little of the black to show through, and gives it a faded effect for the weathering to come. A little overspray on the tire is taken care of with a black wash around the wheel rim after the paint has dried.

Next time, you might try posting your questions like this on the armor forum. There's a ton of good guys and girls there that can intelligently answer your questions about the "dark side" of modelling (as we like to say).

Hope this helps you some.
Gip Winecoff

You can also paint the entire wheel the hub color, mask the inner part with either appropriately sized paper or silly putty, then paint the black.

Gip and ck have this one pretty much covered.

So I'll just go with a welcome to FSM.


See you around the Armour Forum oneton !!!!

Moved to the Armor forum.

Welcome to the forum oneton. Using a sharpie pen works really well. I believe you will be satisfied with the results.
mark956

I seem to remember askin this question myself not that long ago!

One piece of advice i got was 'Buy steel wheel armor only' then its easy to paint them!!

If you paint the rubber rim by hand (which I do - no airbrush) then it's a lot easier to use something as a shaft (I found shish kebob skewers are good) and rotate the wheel with the paintbrush against it instead of painting around the wheel.

thanks to all those who gave me some ex tips on paintin road wheels.the more i think and construct models the more i luv it.also fsm. top mag. i live in australia and buy it now religiously. thanx

QUOTE: If you paint the rubber rim by hand (which I do - no airbrush) then it's a lot easier to use something as a shaft (I found shish kebob skewers are good) and rotate the wheel with the paintbrush against it instead of painting around the wheel.

This is the method I use, with great success. I use toothpicks as holders (Masking tape around the tip can make a more snug fit) I then use Tamiya's Flat Black Acrylic, thinned pretty well, on a brush. Hold the brush steady and twist the toothpick, with the roadwheel on it. The paint covers evenly with no brush strokes!

I forgot to mention, if you have a piece of styrofoam, place the painted roadwheel, on the toothpick, into the styrofoam to dry. Makes a neat little stand and carrier.

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