Wheel Painting Mask -- HO and N

thingiverse

A nice touch in model railroading is painting the wheels. However, care should be taken not to paint the treads as paint wearing off will get rails dirty and it's not prototypical. There are commercially made painting masks available that work well, but their price adds up and might not be available in the size you need. Plus making your own 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 that 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 paint to dry. 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 and if I wanted to spend a little more effort I could have probably parametrized this all in OpenSCAD.