Buffalo progress

A sunny Friday that wasn’t very sunny became the perfect opportunity to progress the Buffalo.

The red high visibility areas were masked and sprayed in the last post. The only colour remaining was the black deice boots, prop hubs, and nose radome. Here is a picture showing the red areas before masking for the black.

Conventional wisdom is that lighter colours are sprayed first. Lighter colours, and especially yellow, don’t cover well, and can take many layers to get good colour density. This allows the darker colours, which typically cover better, to go last. Convention wisdom aside, it didn’t take long to realize that I should have painted the black first. Protecting the yellow from the black areas meant pretty much the entire airplane was covered in tape. Three hours of masking, over 2 days, and it was ready for the black paint. A couple of pictures just prior to spraying the black.

Two pictures with the black areas painted.

A quick 5 minutes and the black was painted. It took longer to clean the airbrush than it did to paint. Oh well. Here’s a picture of the end result. The pile of tape is all the black masking removed.

Three hours of masking paid off, as the black came out cleanly. Unfortunately, I noticed that the front wing to fuselage joint had cracked. I also noticed that the tape pulled up some yellow. You can see it immediately behind the cockpit windows if you look closely. These should be simple repairs that I will tackle once the black is dry. The dark area on the cockpit is where the masking pulled up one of the window masks. The edge around the mask is a little softer than I would have liked. Will need to give some though as to what can be done to fix that.

And then the Doh! moment. As I was cleaning up the used masking and putting things away, I banged the kit box. The open box was sitting to the left of the plane in the pictures. Naturally, I banged the end closest to the desk edge, effectively catapulting the box and all the contents across the shop floor. After a few choice words, and 5 minutes sweeping the floor, I had found all 6 props, 9 landing gear doors, and 12 clear window parts. A dumb mistake but thankfully I found all the loose parts.