On to the thing I have been nervous about for 20 years – the paint. I used to have an airbrush but never really a very good air delivery for it. I had a gloriously Heath Robinson scheme involving a 12V tyre inflator and a trailer wheel & tyre with two valves. The tyre acted as a reservoir to calm the pulsing from the piston compressor. It worked, but never really got good flow rates. These days I have 150 psi compressor I regulate down to use with the airbrush. Much better!
I blew everything over in white, as much for the practice as anything, and fixed the blemishes I found – scratches, dips and so on. I started this process using “normal” masking tape as they sell it over there. To say it was rubbish is an affront to garbage everywhere. It would barely stick to anything, except to my fingers or itself – to which it clung as if to life itself. It made for some very clumsy handling and in the end I cursed it so much I ordered some Tamiya tape – the yellow you see in the photos. This was a night and day difference to use, clinging to the model and itself with about equal (and appropriate) tenacity and barely sticking to my fingers at all.
I presumed the headlight buckets should be body coloured, but then noticed in pictures they were silver. I pulled them out of the bonnet again and carried on to the red. It was just a very standard Testor’s red. I am very out of practice airbrushing, but having recently bought myself a Badger 105 and having acquired a compressor in the last 20 years, I did at least have a fighting chance.
I was initially mixing paint and thinners 1:1 – it seemed OK with the white apart from that enormous sag next to the headlight bucket. But with the red the results were pretty disappointing. Whatever I did with the airbrush I couldn’t seem to keep the paint wet, so it forever had an orange peel look to it, or worse. And it was very thin – looking like it would take a gazillion coats to cover the white. After some experimentation I changed the mix to 2:1 paint to thinners, turned up the pressure on the regulator (an indicated 30psi no load, sagging back to about 25psi) and also adjusted the needle to make it “always open a bit” – about 1-2mm back from the seat. This meant full open the volume of paint was usefully higher – perhaps the lesson here is that I needed a medium tip & needle instead of the fine that airbrush comes with as standard.
Once I got the airbrush delivering enough paint, I discovered a new problem. The detritus from the flocking process, some of which had ended up sitting on the bench, was being drawn into the little spray booth (along with who knows what else). This only started happening with the red and hadn’t happened with any of the colours I had blown previously – semi-gloss black, silver, white. I think the fact that I had upped the pressure was just increasing the volume of air, or else perhaps it was a windier day outside, or whatever. Anyway, I ended up clearing everything off the bench, hoovering, turning my plastic “tablecloth” inside out and generally giving everything a really good clean.
Finally, on track to finish the paint job!
I was really pleased with how well integrated the new rear deck section was to the whole. I have been nervous about it for twenty years, on and off, but it came together a treat. I gave everything multiple coats to get a good finish, with some rubbing down with 3000 grade wet/dry paper between coats. I’m still not *really* delighted with the finish but I am at least satisfied. I am sure it could be better, but life is short and I was moving back to the UK soon. I wanted the damn thing finished! I ended up consuming 8 bottles of Testors red on this!
