Painting trucks

i would take the drive out of the trucks and paint the trucks as an assembly then i would paint the drive as an individual piece clean the wheel threads off and then reassemble. the way you are doing it will leave some of it not completely painted or else you will have to put too much paint on to get complete coverage.

  " Any tips???  "

   Main one is keep the paint off the treads and wiper contact points. I prefer to spray both car and loco trucks with them assembled and the wheels spinning.This keeps the paint off the bearings and leaves a realistic unpainted area around the bearings.For freight cars I just set the car upside down and spin each axle then paint while it spins, locos require some jumper wires to keep the drive running slowly.....DaveB 

Should have corrected these before painting:

Old goat, can you elaborate please?

I just spray away, then wipe contact points with a Q-Tip soaked in lacquer thinner.  Not very elegant, but it works.  I do my steam that way too - get the drivers moving on a trellis of some sort, then spray flat black in there.

Not very professional, but I win prizes in contests.  Most go for total disassembly, and thorough masking.  Depends on your personality.

Brad,

Search for photos of Flexicoil trucks...I believe there are several good shots posted on Flickr.

Brad: The two rods circled are the brake actuators. They should be coming straight out of the brake cylinders axially on centre. In your pic the brake operating arms have been pushed back into the trucks somehow, so the rods are bent towards the truck side frames instead of being parallel to them.

http://www.rrpicturearchives.n...ture.aspx?id=1084769

HTH

Pete    

You may want to anneal them first before bending if you don't know how often they were bent in the past.

One of the things that I'm thinking of in regards to jumping into the kitbashing pool is repainting trucks, so I'm glad I found this thread in the search engine. 

My intent is to repaint the set of trucks under a passenger car that are White/Silver on the outside (and bring too much attention to themselves IMO) to the more appropriate Black. 

When I paint the trucks of a car, I remove the trucks from the car, then remove the wheels from the trucks.  Then I put a small piece of painters tape over the hole in the journal and then paint, either brush or spray.  When dry, I remove the painters tape and I have an unpainted journal, ready for a drop of oil and then the wheels.  The unpainted area cannot normally be seen.  I usually brush paint the wheels.

Ed

I forgot to mention (as this is a 2-Rail Scale thread), how much of a difference does it make if its a a 2-Rail or 3-Rail? I ask this having never seen the underside of a 2-Rail O Scale truck.

How much difference does "what" make exactly.

Disassembly would vary. So would masking.

  2r needs isolated wheel sets. Note the orientations.

 3r will be different by needing a center roller for power.

The isolated 2r wheels circuits can be spliced together, roller added on "convertibles".