Rusting a HO Scale Car into a Junkyard Heap with AK Interactive Rust Deposits & Corrosion Texture

Rusting a Plastic HO Scale Car into a Junkyard Heap

This project was a ton of fun and it ended up turning an otherwise useless Life-Like plastic car into something that we’ll actually use on our layout!

The things I used for this process were:

-A junky Life-Like or other brand el-cheapo plastic vehicle
-AK Interactive Corrosion Texture
-AK Interactive Crusted Rust Deposits (set)
-Mineral Spirits
-Brush
-Weathering Chalks

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Each step of this was fairly simple and you don’t need to worry about being super exact with your rust as it wouldn’t be uniform or balanced in nature either.

Step 1 - Prepare the car

Step one was to remove the wheels and window glass (plastic).

I did this in the WORST possible way for safety, so please don’t do it the way I did and use a safer tool.

After the parts are all removed from the car, you can spray the outside and inside shell of the body of the vehicle with a flat black spray paint.

The spray paint covers up the completely fake look of the cheapy plastic car and gives it some visual weight.

Step 2 - Apply the Corrosion Texture

This step and the steps following are really up to you and how much rust you want the vehicle to have.

Applying the corrosion texture next is what will give your car a very corroded look and almost like the metal panels on the car are peeling and withering away to nothing. Kind of like how rust looks when it’s very old and ‘flakey’ or bubbling the metal.

Follow the video for examples on how I applied the crusted rust & the rust deposits.

I used the heavy rust deposits as a base coat and gave it a pretty thorough covering. This is totally up to you, but do make sure to hit the areas that have more of the corrosion texture built-up.

For the second and third rounds of crusted rust deposits (medium and light), you’re going to want to use less and less, only creating area’s where the rust is built-up more.

The key is layers… Layers, layers, and patience… And Layers.

Once you’re happy, you can apply an optional wash of mineral spirits LIGHTLY to even out the tones of the rust. If you only rusted a small spot, you probably don’t need to do that.

Step 3 - Applying some weathering chalks

The final step of the rusting/corrosion process that I do is to just hit the while vehicle body with a layer of brown chalks to tone it all down a little bit more, then go back over the areas of the car like bumpers, grilles, panel lines and such with a very little bit of black chalks.

From here you can decide to re-insert the plastic glass window insert and re-paint the wheels and tires to make them more realistic or not. That’s for another video, this one was just about rusting a car completely.

Hope you enjoyed the video tutorial of how we turned a Life-Like vehicle into a rust heap!

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