repainting

[doctorwayne]

Depending on who made the car, you may be able to paint over factory-applied paint.  Some brands, like Tyco and the original LifeLike, used too much paint, and it hid, on some cars, rather well-executed details.  Regular Athearn cars had relatively thin paint, but it's easy to strip off if you need a fresh start.

My preference, in almost all cases, is to remove the paint and start fresh.  This also affords an opportunity to add some better details, such as free-standing grabirons or to simply remove some details which are out-of-scale or non-prototypical.

Here's a couple of Train Miniature cars with the original paint stripped-off.....





In both examples, this made it easy to get rid of the oversized and improperly-placed door tracks, creating new ones using strip styrene.  Both cars also use modified Athearn doors.

Here's the same cars, repainted and re-lettered....





Wayne