A few weeks back we received from weathering products to test out from DEBENLLC Publications & Products AKA: Dr. Ben’s Scale Consortium.
Brett wanted to try out the Knotty Walnut weathering stain in which he did a full review on while using it for one of his recent structure
builds. I chose to test out Huck’s Whitewash Weathering Solution because for a few years now I had been eyeballing their products and wanting to give them a whirl on some of our projects.
We all know, or should know about Huck Finn the boyhood friend of Tom Sawyer from the fiction classic novel by Mark Twain. So when I thought of Huck’s Whitewash I immediately envisioned a part in the story where Huck and Tom were painting a fence trying to convince other boys that it was fun as a way to have others do the work. So I saw a direct correlation between the fun we have when painting our model structures (although we don’t have to be tricked into it). I also thought of those whitewashed fence boards and how something like that would look on a well used building.
Diving In With The Brush and Pail
When you first open a jar of Huck’s Whitewash, you will see instantly, this is not paint. Don’t mistaken it for paint, and it is not intended to be paint. So paint it is not. Got it? This is a weathering solution and it is 
alcohol based, I am certain, as when I made an error with it and wanted to remove some, I used clean and clear 93% isopropyl alcohol on a clean brush and it came off magically without screwing up any other paint undercoatings. Impressive.
You will notice that it is a very quick moving and milky bright white medium. I was tempted to drink it with some cookies. (DO NOT DRINK IT! JEEESH! I was only kidding!)
So how do you apply it? Well as this is not paint, and is a wash, you must think of it as a wash. A wash you brush on and coat the surface you are trying to give a whitewash. It should be thin as I mentioned above and if there are undercoatings of paint, stains or even just raw wood, you should be able to vaguely see that. You want to create the appearance of lower layers and surfaces. At least that is how I view a wash. So I found two great ways to apply it and I loved the results I got.
One of course with the brush as you will see on the photos with a sample piece of wood. You will notice that on the wood I prestained it with a medium Alcohol India Ink solution on one half and a dark solution on the other. This way you can see the different results. A solid single coat got the results that I wanted, allowing the stains to be faintly seen below. Less so, with the light stain of course.
I also tried the same test with some trim, to show you how well this gives the trim a nice faint, perhaps faded white appearance. You can even run some sandpaper over it when it dries to remove it it some to show a peel. But my favorite way to apply this with I feel the best results was with some soft cloth (gun cleaning cloth squares) that I dip into the jar directly to lightly soak and then rub it onto the surface. Let it sit for about forty seconds and then using a dry clean cloth, rub over it again removing some of the chalky build up of white. It shows some wood below the surface in a way that was not too much white.
Time For This Badboy Product To Go To Work!
I loved the results so much that I was ready and confident of the look I was going to get from it on the craftsman kit warehouse structure I was working on. The warehouse walls are covered in corrugated siding and it was to get two colors. The large lower area in green, the painted sign area along the top side as a sign banner of sorts was to be in white. I didnt want to use paint. I was going for the whitewash look so you could see the dark gray undercoating below the whitewash, and also to not overpower everything in bright white so that when I weather with some rust streaking it looks at place and natural. Also afterwards I was to use a stencil to paint on dark gray lettering for the buildings business name. As that stencil painting is to be faded and worn, it could not get lost in a sea of bright ultra white.
To pull this off, I had to mask off the lower section after painting it green. I did not want the thinner whitewash to run as it surely would have went under the tape due to the corrugation ripples. So using the cloth as I mentioned above, I dabbed it on lightly and rubbed upward on the wall towards the edge until I whitewashed the entire length. I then turned the entire model upside-down so any excess would run towards the roof.
The result was awesome! I pulled the tape away when it was dry and I had a nearly perfect line dividing white and green that looked just super realistic looking. The whitewash was thin enough to also give the corrugation ridges a look of darker gray showing easily through and I had the look I wanted! I knew the signage with the paint template was going to rock on it! I feel it did!
Why Stop There?!
Enjoying that result so much, I wanted to use the whitewash on all the trim work like I did on the strip piece. The look I got was one that showed enough of the black A/I wash underneath so it appeared both fading and like it might have picked up a bit of weather by rain and a faint dirt. I really didn’t need to weather it much after with pigments. The only thing white that was not done with Dr. Ben’s Huck’s Whitewash was the windows.
Overview
What a super cool product this is! It gave what it said it would deliver. An old fashioned whitewashing. The effect was marvelous, and I had fun toying around with it. I have an entire waterfront of scratch built structures I am starting next, and I have a million ideas using this product. What’s more is that this solution as are all of Dr. Ben’s products, is color fast! I don’t have to worry about UV light from lights or sunlight fading out my work. Gotta love that! I will definitely be using more of these solutions and stains and there is a lot of great types for me to play around with. I hard used any of this product and it still looks like a full container. I will likely have it for a long time to come. Dr. Ben has obviously done their homework on these quality weathering products and if you need instruction on how to use them, they have available instruction on how. Many other quality weathering products I use, do not.
Two thumbs up!
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