Decaling—Changing the Number on a Boxcar

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.