I made some more progress on the Target Tow plane.
To begin with, I masked off the areas that I didn't want painted with "Engine Gray".
Here's a little trick I learned about masking from working on full sized cars, regarding detail painting...
You can use plain old aluminum foil to mask off areas. Id has an advantage of not being sticky and will not break off little parts as easily as tape will. So I simply wrap the areas in foil, then mask along the edges to keep overspray from getting under the foil and messing up the underlying paint.
The foil also can be stuffed into things like cowlings fairly easy...
Here in this picture I used it to wrap the Pratt and Whitney R2800... You can also see how I taped the edges of the foil where it meets the fuselage sides.
This photo shows the cowling after I sprayed on some Engine Gray. It is still very wet at this point. Eventually it dries with a flat sheen. By chance I found that an old glue bottle was the perfect size to hold the part while I sprayed it...
These two pictures show the fuselage and cowling after both have been sprayed.
I'm using Model Master enamels on these planes. The "Engine Gray" color that is called for on the Target Tow plane is FS 36076. Sadly a while ago they quit producing the gloss version which was FS 16076. The first numbers indicate the gloss of a particular color.
1 is for gloss
2 is for s semi-gloss
3 is for flat finishes.
I know the color will dry different than how it looks here. This is the same color as viewed from the bottom of the bottle. Proper mixing and even the base color and spraying techniques can all affect how the final color actually looks.
After things dried... (notice how flat this color is), I had another canopy problem. I am thinking it had to be something I did when I assembled these that allowed a slight amount of over spray to seep inside the canopy...
If you look close here, you will see how it's blotched on the inside of the glass in this picture below.
Here's the overall appearance of the plane at this point in the game...
I knew that something had to be done...with the canopy... so I managed to pry off the windscreen without causing any damage...
I guess practice makes perfect. But this is getting old...
Now I simply used a dry Q-tip swab and cleaned the inside of the clear parts...
This shows the results afterwards on the cotton swab. You can see the green residue... I used two swabs getting it cleaned. But thankfully, it was done without too much grief.
So the next logical step was to glue it back on again and hope for the best since I was only going to be spraying clear from now on...
Here's a close up of the canopy afterwards... Right after this picture was taken, I touched up the excess glue that was along the lower leading edge of the windscreen. It looks a whole lot better now...
Finally I sprayed several coats of Future and let it sit. Here's how the plane looks now.
While this one dries some, I'll tackle the decals on the Orange Drone ... Good Ol' Number 7...
As usual, comments are encouraged.
and a great big Thanks go out to Martin and his staff for fixing the build log so we can continue to post here.
Take care !
