Guinness’ Pictoral Guide to Weathering; Part II: Rack Numbers

Written by Guinness
September 19th, 2007

Here is something that can add a little bit of extra authenticity and feel to your weapon. Rack or ‘arsenal’ numbers were stencils that were painted on to inventory rifles and have been around forever. You don’t see them much on WWII era weapons just because G.I.s kept their Garands and Carbines close by for the duration, However by the Korean Conflict and then Vietnam the practice of keeping track of rifles with painted on numbers is more common. Soldiers began turning their weapons into the weapons cache when they weren’t carrying them, hence the need to assign numbers for inventory.

Application

I bought a set of kids arts and crafts stencils at the local Michaels that had typeface and also a set that had a military look to them. I think that cost around $8 bucks

I chose an off-white acrylic paint to fill in the stencil number to show age. The paint was $1.50

And I globbed the paint on because this would have been done by someone that probably didnt care how messy it was going to look.

I let it dry for a couple of minutes, then I went over the numbers and letters with the fine sand paper to rough it and remove just a bit.

The cool thing about rack numbers is, there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to do it- they were painted different colors, they were painted verticle or horizontal, there is no real standard, so do some research by looking at photographs, but also use your creativity!