The Little World

Or ” How to build scale models without dying in the process “.

The interior of the Little Workshop was over 42º Celsius one afternoon. No surprise – it was predicted to be a hot, still Sunday and the prediction was accurate. Also no surprise – this was Western Australia in the summertime. We saw a spate of news reports entitled ” Phew “, ” How We Sweltered ” and   ” It’s A Scorcher “. We have those sort of journalists…

I retreated into the air conditioning of the Little Office with my portable modelling tray and got busy building up the Piasecki. It was a simple Amodel kit and had a better fit to most of the parts than did their last example. I was pleased with that, and pleased that the central cockpit and cargo area actually formed a tray that could be slid into the fuselage after it was glued together and painted. It meant the masking for the thing would be much easier.

The internal subassemblies eventually got to a point where the parts needed paint – and the paint was outside in 42º. What to do?

Got all the subassemblies masked or sorted into different colours – taped down to the spray boards and ready for the gun. Did everything I could so that I just need to spray.

Then pulled up the BGP and went and did it. The paint in the pots heated up by lunchtime and flowed well – as did the thinner. I just moved through the colours – lightest to darkest, and cleaned the pot and nozzle between each hue. If you want a good video illustration of a spray booth workflow go google up Dr. Cranky and his scale model car LabRATory. He has the best sensible approach I’ve ever seen, and I’ve adopted it.

At this sort of temperature aqueous or solvent-based acrylics sprayed fantastically well – they hit, leveled, and dried almost instantly and there were no fears of run marks. The curing time must have accelerated as well – though I took the results back inside to the cooled office once the gun was cleaned. The spray paint worker was a bit of a sweaty mess, but there was cold water in the fridge to cure that…and the temperature in the Little Workshop fell after sundown anyway.

Heading Image: Cognoscenti will recognise the two shades of US paint – zinc chromate and interior green. Whatever secondary buyers may do to the paint job on the outside of a secondhand aircraft, they rarely respray the inside.