Wheel Painting Mask -- HO and N

thingiverse

A nice touch in model railroading is to paint the wheels. However, care should be taken to not paint the treads as the paint wearing off will get the rails dirty, and it's not prototypical. There are nice commercially made painting masks available. But their price adds up, and might not be available in the size you need. Plus if you make your own, you can print a bunch and speed up the process of painting your fleet. Here are painting masks for HO scale 'code 110' and N Scale 'code 72' wheels in both 33" and 36" sizes. These can be used for either brush or spray painting. See https://www.nmra.org/sites/default/files/standards/sandrp/pdf/RP-25%202009.07.pdf for a discussion of wheel profiles and recommended sizes. To make jigs for HO code 88 reduce the thickness of the side plates to .063", for N code 54 .040". The bottom is square so that the mask can be stood on its end for the paint to dry. I found that using small rubber bands to get a *little* more tension on the end plates can be useful' If you need masks for other diameters, gauges, or wheel codes, contact me. The masks are pretty simple. If I wanted to spend a little more effort, I could have probably parametrized this all in OpenSCAD.