A post that is two weeks in the making showing continued slow progress on planes.
White body and wings has been sprayed. Unfortunately, it has pointed some flaws with panel lines on the fuselage. A little superglue, some sanding, rescribed, and it’s ready for primer.
Panel line filled, sanded, and rescribed.
Primer reapplied. Looks pretty good. Will let it sit for a day, then sand and reapply the gloss white.
Turns out it sat for more than a day. It was actually two weeks before I got back to the bench!.
The picture above after the white gloss paint was resprayed and lightly sanded. Still a little work to do but I am happy with the repair. Next up - a couple hours of masking before spraying the black paint on the belly, tail, and engine bodies.
Here is the Buffalo before the yellow is polished.
The Yellow paint has been sanded and then polished to even it out and get a nice smooth surface. A smooth surface may allow decals to be applied directly. If a gloss coat is needed/desired, a smooth surface reduces the effort to get a nice, glossy top coat.
Here is what two hours of masking looks like. The vertical fuselage band aft of the wings was difficult. There is a horizontal yellow stripe that passes thru the red band where the lettering goes. It takes some patience to figure out how wide and tall the lettering is, then place appropriately sized tape to block it off. Thank goodness for parallel dividers!
And here it is with the tape off. I forgot to spray the red bump just ahead of the tail. It was all taped off but I forgot it when spraying. Fortunately I realized my error before I had pulled the tape off. It was a matter of reloading the airbrush and a couple blasts of paint and it was done. Can you see my other mistake? There is a step in the red on the top, starboard side of the horizontal stabilizer that I missed when masking. I got the port side right but not the starboard. In the picture above, I have already very gently scraped the still soft red paint away from the area that is supposed to be yellow. This should may it easier to apply the yellow touch up - a notoriously difficult color to touch up.
There is still a ton of masking needed for the black - nose radome, the prop hubs, and deicing boots on the wings and horizontal stabilizers. That is going to take some time.
Speaking of a masking. While looking at the painting instructions, I realized that the props are going to take a lot of effort to paint. The bottom half of each blade is black, while the top half Is grey. Then there is a red/white/red warning stripe at the blade tip. All this needs to be painted on a blade that is about 1.5 cm long! I am going to need to think about the best way to mask them off.
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