How to: Achieve a mirror-like metal finish using Alclad
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu8xbg09y08
Here's a short video workshop on natural metal finishes with Jay Laverty at the Lier convention 2010, in which Larry demonstrates how to achieve a mirror-like metal finish with Alclad.
This is great, but the fact is that NMF never ever lolks like this ever looks like this outside of two considerations: I remember a warbird owner who had a T-6 in polished NMF and he always kept it in a hangar, polishing it for 3 hours for every hour flown. All high polished NMF finishes on warbirds are the result of polishing them out and then painting them with polyurethane gloss. No normal airplane in NMF ever looks like this, because natural metal goes to schmutz in sunlight. The real NMF finish of any real airplane looks like what yiu geet with Tamiya flat aluminum. Any model I saw looking like this, I would disparage it as the result of a modeler who didn't know what he was doing. This kind of finish only exists with warbirds covered in gloss finish. Anyone presenting a model here in this finish will get a Minus-1 from me in the ratings for failure to do proper research.
The above is a pretty strong statement but I stand by it. It's these unrealistic finishes that put most modelers off doing NMF, when the truth is that an accurate-looking model in NMF is quite easy to achieve.