Tag: Masking
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De Havilland Mosquito – Part Five – Can I Make A Mess?

Or can I what? Here are the in-progress shots of the Great Masking Adventure as it unfolded. Since it was entirely new ground, I cannot be sure whether I was doing it right. But the fact that nothing caught fire has to count as something good… Here’s the overnight result – surprisingly successful, with only…
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Hawker Hurricane Mk II – Part Three – The Beauty Salon

It was cold tonight. Rainy. I adjourned into the computer room with a portable modelling tray to proceed with the Hurricane in some comfort – the Little Workshop was just too miserable to work in, even with the heater on. The task was masking the pattern illustrated in the Avia publication on Canadian warplanes. I…
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Macchi MC.200 Saetta – Part Two – A or B?

The usual procedure for my painting of camouflaged aircraft up until now has been: a. Smooth and fill seams and make the basic airframe ready. Prime with a Tamiya spray can. b. Paint the solid underside colour. c. Cover this with tape and occasionally with Maskol. d. Paint the lighter of the top colours. e.…
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Ticking Them Off

Ticking them off is ticking me off. I mean the various means for producing camouflage paint schemes on model aircraft. Recently I tried the Silly Putty Snake method for making British A and B aircraft patterns. I had two pots of different brands of silly putty and had researched all the YouTube videos on how…
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Handley Page Hampden – Part Three – Success Masquerading As Failure
Having overcome Part Two – the warp factor – I set myself the task of assembling the Hampden, and was pleasantly surprised by how well it cobbled together. The wing tabs were tight, but a little sanding loosened them and a little more sanding snugged the wing roots in close enough to the fuselage to…
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When In Doubt…

When in doubt, do it the way the original was done. There was generally a reason for this and you may have stumbled upon it again. Case in point: doing the second blue paint coat on the PRU Lockheed P-38 Lightning. The first coat had cured for a day, and the second one was due…
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” Hey You! What’s The Small Idea? ” – F2A Three

If I were a spray painter on a full-size airplane I’d have no troubles spraying a fine line between colours. A few sheets of newspaper to screen off the overspray and away I’d go matching up the instructions. But I am working in 1:72 scale and I don’t think that my hand skills are such…
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The Mask Of Scale-Model Comedy Is A Mask Of 1:1 Tragedy

And vice versa. And even if you have come to prefer your vice versa, you still have to take time out of your busy round of orgies to deal with the painting on your model airplane, structure, or car. And inevitably you are going to need to mask something off for some reason. Brace yourself…
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Patchy Is As Patchy Does

And no-one is patchier than me… I watched a YouTube post some time ago from a modeller who was making extremely precise masks for spray painting by using his inkjet printer. I believe he was printing on a self-adhesive paper and planned to stick this onto plastic models. He was very concerned about scaling the…
