Weathering truck cargo beds

[castelnuovo]

I am building the Studebacker. Any tips on making the cargo bed worn, scratched etc?

Thanks...

[tcoat]

Is it molded with wood grain planks and metal strips or all smooth metal? I have methods for both.

[castelnuovo]

With wooden planks.

[tcoat]

Ok. I will pull together a short tutorial for wood. 

[tcoat]

OK for the wood planks. I will show what to do with the metal joiner strips after the wood.

Light coat of a base wood colour in whatever type of paint you wish. Pretty much any tan will do. If you are going to do a very old and weathered truck a light grey will be more effective for aged wood. I presume from your other thread that the plastic is sort of olive so it would not hurt if just a hint of that still shows through the paint.



Next I use a wash of black tinted Future Floor finish to seal the base and start to bring out the grain. If you don't have Future you can use any gloss clear to seal it at this point.


Over the gloss I use Citadel Nulin Oil (that is the name it is actually some sort of acrylic) wash but whatever you would use for panel lines etc would do the job. The gloss coat helps it settle into the low spots.



Then a light coat of a water based acrylic (I use Tamiya) in the body colour goes on. It should be just thick enough to cover the surface but still let just a hair of the grain show through.


Let it dry for a few minutes and then use an old stiff brush dipped in water to just scrub off the amount you want to show the wear. Timing is important here because you want the paint set up a bit but not completely dry. You could use the salt or hairspray method here but I like the the effect of just using water on the still uncured paint a bit more. Keep in mid that  around the outer edges and directly beside the metal strips will receive a lot less wear than the centers of the planks.


Last up is another dirty wash in a dark brown or black and whatever your preference in flat coat is. You can add any staining or dirt on top of that.


I find this gives a very convincing look to worn and heavily weather paint on wood.

Will show the metal strips in a bit.

[tcoat]

Oh and don't let all those steps scare you off! Each one only takes a couple of minutes. I doubt I spent a full hour of working time on all this wood.

[vw8243]

This is good to know,

   Thank you.

[lyle]

Nice and clear. Thank you.

[tcoat]

The metal strips will be similar but I would use the salt method to get a finer pattern on them. Could be done in conjunction with the wood.

After prepping the wood planks but before adding the body colour coat paint the strips in varied rust tones and/or bare steel colour if doing fresher damage. With a small brush wet just the steel strips being careful not to get any on the wooded sections. Sprinkle salt on the strips where you want the wear and chips to be . Let it dry well and remove any stray salt from the wood areas. Paint the body colour over the whole box floor. While doing the planks just brush the salt off the metal trips at the same time. If you rub the salt off with a tissue you can get strips that will look like scrapes as well as the chips.

Don't have a pile of pictures of this but here is a before and after.

Various rust tones with salt covering



After overcoat with salt rubbed off


You could do this over the whole bed and skip the wood process but the damage and wear to paint on steel is different than that on wood so doing these methods gives you both types. 
There are of course other methods that somebody my chime in with but these are easy and the effect is on scale.

[castelnuovo]

That looks great, thanks...

[kyledehart5]

Awesome tutorials Tony. Very handy.