The Little World

Well that was interesting. Yesterday’s post about painting the underside of the Northrop Delta 1D was all very well until I decided to mask it and turn it over for the topcoat.

The masking went well – various pads and rolls of masking tape squeezed and folded into the crannies underneath – the last few gaps occluded with a matchstick of Humbrol Maskol rubber solution. ( Hate the smell of that stuff, but it does do what it claims to do.)

Then I tried to prise the thing off the cradle. The double-sided tape is the padded version and it sticks like crazy – so tight that it pulled the pilot’s canopy off its glue base! So there was an hour hiatus while the canopy was re-glued. In the future the cradle will be lined with folded masking tape – that releases rather well.

Okay, this picture is pure bragging – it shows two airbrushes on a dedicated stand with a Y-shaped connector feeding both hoses. The air compressor I use is not a small, silent hobby one – it’s a big honking industrial one with a large reservoir tank. So presumably I could load up both guns and alternately spray camo pattern paints fresh on the wings. This sounds like a really cool bad idea that I am not going to do sober.

Note for frugal modellers: The idea of two guns is really so that one can have a .02 nozzle and the other a .05 one. Also so that the bigger spray jobs can be taken care of with a pistol trigger rather than the two-stage button on a standard gun. Now I’m not going to say don’t buy your airbrushes at the hobby shop, but give some serious consideration to going to a commercial air tool and supply place. I did for the hoses, fittings, and cleaning accessories, and the price was a fraction of what it was in the hobby shops. Plus you can get medium size gravity guns with .08 nozzles for really large model jobs.

It is a bit of a trap, but. You start to have these ideas, like you do when you go down the centre aisle of Aldi. I’ve got a mini sandblasting gun that I’ve yet to use, but I know just what it will be perfect for. The guy who sells the equipment is really an expert in it, so you can go in with a vague notion, drop $ 35, and come out with a workable solution. Try that at any other place in town…

The booth is a standard vented type and fortunately I have a downstream window that can take the exhaust. There are hardly any fumes or odours despite the nature of the paints being sprayed. The LED lighting is a nice touch, but the blue colour of the LED elements is quite disconcerting when you have carefully mixed a colour – as you shoot it you have this horrible moment wondering if you grabbed the wrong bottle. The liners are disposable pet incontinence pads that I inherited. The cat got better…