The Little World

To get you up to speed – Google Occam’s Razor. It’s a fascinating read – but cut to the bone, it is the business of deliberate seeking the simplest explanation for something. In my case it was the business of making rust.

Not real rust, you understand – that is a matter of iron, water, and time. And very little use to anyone when you have it, I might add…

Plastic rust. Fake rust. Rust at likely points on my old uncle’s ’31 Ford – a car that is to be some six years old at the time of modelling. I knew that there were experts at the business – people who could make deterioration far better than ever I could:

But I was not looking for that much horror. Just a little distress. So I Googled and YouTubed…and got my distress. It was chiefly because everyone had a different way of doing things. The longer you looked the more complex it got.

I could see the rational in some of the steps but the ones with hairspray and floor wax beat me. I was ready to give up and paint it in a pristine condition until I turned up one English chap who did the job right there in front of the lens with a paintbrush full of water and some rock salt. He just wet the appropriate place, sprinkled on salt, and gaily painted over it in five minutes. After his paint was dry he scrubbed the salt off and it was done. My kind of procedure.

I also opted for a 50:50 mixture of gloss black and flat black for the fenders over a simple red-oxide primer. The surface is scruffy to some extent and more so in the rust cracks. I’ve added some brown over spray and when we come to the dust spray stage it will get even scrappier…but without becoming a parody of itself.

The bodywork is the sort of repaint green that was common at the time, but also has its distressed areas. Nothing gleams but there is a feeling that it once did. And the Incident Of The Door ( don’t ask…) has been largely retrieved by getting one from a junkyard car. The original Washington Blue will eventually get a re-spray when Uncle Jack gets a little money. He’s going into the Navy and they pay regularly plus there’s a chance he’ll get to go to Hawaii in ’41…