Hi Guys, Bought some Floquil UP Armour Yellow few months back, wow is that stuff pale! Way off anything I'd call Armour Yellow. My question is, is their UP Light Orange anywhere near proper armour yellow? I'm going to need to paint a Gas Turbine soon and I want to get it right. If the light orange is nowhere near does anybody have any suggestions? I post a separate thread about the gas turbine, it's a completed re-hashed concor veranda, etched tender walkways, brass stanchions, lowered 'veranda' walkway, re-shaped nose, new exhaust, etc. Thanks for any replys, Phil
First, call the Testor Corporation and complain. Tell them the color you have is so far of drift it would be great if you were modeling a locomotive that hasn't seen shade in 30 years. A few of us custom painters in these parts have had color problems with both Floquil and Polly Scale. I have bottles of paint from years back that do match my chips and newer bottles are not even close. I think it is a poor excuse to charge over $4.00 a bottle for paint that doesn't match OEM new colors. The UP orange will not work, that color was for the UP reefers. Badger Modelflex makes a UP Armour Yellow. It is acrylic but pre thinned and has a nice semi gloss finish perfect for decals. I spray it with a #3 needle at 18-20 PSI. Testors has wanted to get rid of the Floquil and Pollyscale line for years, they are doing a pretty good job of it with the lack of QC.
The last time I painted anything UP, I contacted a friend of mine who is a UP modeler and he said that there is nothing out there that he felt was accurate. His suggestion was a fresh bottle of UP Armor Yellow with 3 drops of Caboose Red added. It was enough to change the tint and get the color within reason...
I have the same problem with poly scale armor yellow. I added a drop of reefer orange to it and it was close enough for painting details on a factory painted unit. I have an SD70M to paint and might try using tru color paint as I've heard some good stuff about it.
I had the same problem with Railbox yellow. I shot all the models at the same time out of one bottle and killed the bottle. Due to my own stupid mistake I had to repaint a cupola for a caboose and body for a loco. Well bought another bottle of the same color and shot the cupola and body and found out it was WAY too opaque. It was almost like the paint was too white. Needless to say now I have to try and "tint" the paint to make it match.
Despite the propaganda there is no such thing as Armour Yellow. The only time two pieces of equipment are the same color is when they are painted from the same barrel at the same time. But the color changes from the top to the bottom of the barrel. Once the first piece of rolling stock is hit by light it will be a different color from the one that rolls out two minutes later. The environment changes the paint as soon as it is exposed to it. It gets worse as you go back in time for your materials.Yellow and Red paints are the worst. When exposed to Ultraviolet light the paint starts to fade. The UP runs in the most UV of any railroad in the U.S. UP does not have a vast lake of yellow paint. It's made in batches. Small batches. Before today's computer controlled mixing and longer lasting pigments, the paint was mixed per paint job by human beings. A 55 gallon drum would be a big batch. And they can't match the paint from batch to batch. On top of that each container of mixing stock varies too. Oh by the way the pigments in the 20teens are better than the pigments of the 2000s etc. By the time you get to the 1960s the paint quality is getting pathetic. Before the thirties equipment was constantly being painted. Mineral based pigments are totally inconsistent. The simplest example on how two batches of Armour Yellow don't match is the renumbering patches. You can tell the difference between the two. It's not just the grime. To make things worse printing ink, photo chemicals and film stock all change over time. Taking two pictures five minutes apart will even produce two different colored photos as the light changes in that time affects the color of the paint. So how can you tell your sample image are correct? Forget about your computer screen no two are alike. PCs are worst. Then there is the worst tool of measurement of all. Your eyes. Compared to anyone else you don't see the same color. The environment changes what you see too. Go from one room to another with a train car in your hand and a glove. Look at it with and without the glove on in each room, You will see four different colors. So this complaining about incorrect colors is utter FERTILIZER! Mix the paint colors until you think you got it right. By the time it dries it will be wrong again.
OH, I almost forgot. Absolutely, all photos used for printed materials, advertising or PR are touched-up and "color corrected."
Not in the least. Even with all the excuses, colors still have a certain tint or hue to them. A redish/orangish yellow will never look like a greenish yellow. In my case CGW red has at least some part orange to it so something like caboose red needs to be mixed with SP scarlett or similar or will never look right. Jason
Yes,but that's talking about the real locomotive in the real world,not model paint.I expect model paint to be at least CLOSE,I don't expect to buy a bottle of UP yellow,and it looks white.The manufacturer made the same product for decades,if the color is THAT off,then their QC stinks.At 4 bucks + a bottle,when I'm pretty much buying it by the drop,it should be what I payed for.I'm not the UP mixing paint by the 55 gallon drum,I'm a guy buying a five dollar bottle of paint that should match,or at least be a shade or two close to the last.Most paint manufacturers today also don't use mineral based pigment,most are synthetic..It also amazes me that Floquil has somehow managed to change the volume of an ounce.My old "one ounce" bottles are at least 20% bigger than my newer "one ounce" bottles..Must be a Tardis thing..
Not to mention that if you look at the bottom of the bottle...it most likely has a deeper 'dimple' then an older bottle thus less volume IN the bottle. We read a consumer report on this very thing. Even canned products like vegetables have a deeper recess in the bottom of the can. Same ol height size can...less product...same ol price. Aint life grand ? !!!!
This is corp America at its finest! It erks me when a co. finds a way to SCREW the American public by selling us less product and charging us the same $$$ if not more and we get less. The co. ends up lining some corp mucky mucks pockets and us John Q citizen ends up with less $$$ in our bank accts at the end of the month. But what are we all supposed to do. Corp America has us ALL bent over the barrel.
When you plucked the wrong jar off the display, did you compare the bottle to a loco your trying to match. I've read quite a few articles of people painting their equipment with color not for that specific railroad because the color matched much better than the one suggested on the bottle. Be glad you don't have to match Zeto Yellow. There's at least 400 shades found on images. I have only two, no others were made.
You bring new meaning to the word cantancerous don't you? I know that railroads mixed thier own colours, I also know that not one batch was alike, and that UV has terrible effects on colour particularly yellow and red. I didn't pluck the wrong jar off the shelf, firstly because I live in the UK and nobody over here sells the stuff so there was no "shelf", I bought it on the internet and secondly when I buy a paint that says Armour Yellow, I 'trust' it to be somewhere near, not the shade of a John-Boys straw hat. I agree with what everbody else says, and if kato can get it within a few shades extremely consistently for the past 15 years plus, then so should a company whose business is to sell specific shades of paint to modellers. You want the thing to look like it did then it rolled out of the shop, fresh painted - if you want it to look like it's been out in the Utah sun for 20 years, you can do that really easy, you can't spray a model a faded colour then brighten it up now can you? I guess that obvious but so was your agruement about different shades. Also your comment about company's touching up their advertisements etc, why would they do that, need to or be able to do that if there wasn't a specific Armour Yellow within a couple of shades? Hmmm. . . . Because UP - IS Armour Yellow, it's their colour, instantly recognisable, a streamliner for instance, the loco's and cars pretty much darn near matched, they just looked after them - it's all part of corporate image and don't tell me that's not important - Bingo that's why they touched up their images, advertisements, etc. Let me tell you there is a company overhere called Phoenix Precision who make paints for British railway models, I have used them and my dad used them for the past 10 YEARS and oh look all the loco's in his case are the same shade of maroon, so that is quality control! The company and paint is so good that many of the professional full scale restorers of loco's use their paints on the real thing! I'd like to see floquil Armour Yellow on the side of a UP SD90MAC, it'd look like they'd painted it with Latex Magnolia, and I don't think the management would be best pleased about that? At the end of the day like everbody else says if you buy a 1oz bottle of paint for 4-5 dollars you expect it to do what it says on the tin, especially if your me and you had to import the stuff, it ended up being about $10 a bottle. Phil
Let's not miss the even finer point that the paint is also as thin as water now,so it goes even quicker.I'm lucky to get 5-6 locos out of a bottle,I used to get twenty,LOL!!!
I seldom look at the name on the bottle anymore,I have so much paint,I just mix up the exact color I want,and stock the ones that look like I could use them..
The real fun occurs when trying to match a manufacturer's paint job for a little touch up. I never knew that there were that many shades of orange and green for GN cars and locos. I had to correct some things on my LL E-7s and ended up mixing my own to match what LL had put on which was not that far off the 1 to 1 paint. But the paints from the manufacturers are so far apart from each other you wonder where they do thier research and then the paints in the bottles are the same story. Which is why I don't mix up my F units by manufacturer. At least the entire Kato lash up matches and the LL and Bmann and Concor units at least all match.
Adding a few drops of red to anybody's UP Yellow is probably the best answer. I did that when repainting cars to match the COLA Kato cars (which are a different yellow from the original 6-car UP set yellow). I also needed a satin finish to match the semi-semi-gloss of the Kato cars. Even so, when model paint dries it DOES change the shade. What happened was my paint color (unlike the COLA cars) looked like what UP stuff actually looks like -- or what would be considered an "Average" UP yellow. The mix was 70:3 Modelflex UP yellow to Signal red.
When I was at Floquil, all the RR colors were matched to original factory new color chips from Dupont. The UP Armour yellow, BNSF Orange and CSX blue were among the modern colors that we worked with both the Railroads and Dupont Industrial. That practice has gone by the way side apparently. It is getting harder and harder to be a custom painter anymore. Consider this. Floquil used to use a lot of my models in both N and HO for everything from packaging to ads. Now they use a ready to run items.
I'm sorry, I didn't understand that you had to import the paint. A lot of us in North America take it for granted that the paint colors usually don't match the color we are looking for. A lot of it has to do with how the corporations are run now. The bigger the corp the less the customer matters. Few people sue over an imperfect hobby product. If you read a few posts on paint colors you'll find that is just under rail code for things that come close causing riots like discussions of religion, politics, computer choice or even DCC selection in confusion, anger and zealotry. The paint war boils down to that each manufacturer has their own version of a color. And over time the paint batches do vary within a single manufacturer. As a graphic designer I have spent up to a week trying to match the color of a box for a label. I used different computers, printers and paper stock. I still didn't match it I came down to my boss saying "use the last one.' Many people don't understand what affects colors. There have been dozens of stories of a model perfected on the workbench that looked completely wrong on the layout and even worse when photographed in daylight. The only change was the source of light. Few people don't realize how much their perception of anything is different than reality. Modelers don't realize that what they think is something standard isn't. Often times the first car and the last car of a manufactured car can differ quite a lot. Even though they may have built from the same blueprints. Many modelers have abandoned the model railroad paints altogether. Humbrol is a very popular brand now, even though no paint is an exact match.
Not wanting to further the dispute, but I have to agree with ChicagoNW. I have the paint logs from the B&O shop the my great uncle managed. In it there was an entry: Sentinel Blue 6 parts Ford Midnight Blue, 1 part Black and 1 part Hunter green. This was because they ran out of paint and had to make their own. I had a chance to chat with him before he passed away, and he was amazed at all the attention devoted to the paint color. As was said, the shades varied from batch to batch. In each event, they, like us, had to find a way to get the colors close enough. So the mixing of the colors is also prototypical.
