Stunt News

[john e. holliday]

Just finished reading my down load of Stunt News.  It is great to see the color pictures and able to enlarge so this old man can read.  The reason I post this is a great article by Jake Moon on finishing an airplane.   As where he resides does not have the materials that most of us have.   Would love to see the plane in person as the pictures so it quite well.   Thank to him for writing the article and Pampa for printing it.

[Shorts,David]

Jake is taking on a larger role as an assistant editor with Matt and myself.
Glad to hear you enjoyed it. Your appreciation makes it worth doing.
David

[Bill Schluckbier]

Nicely done, enjoyed Jake's write up of his adventures trying to carry on with the hobby while living in Singapore.

[Jake Moon]

Thank you for the compliment! I'm glad it's of interest.
I'm actually putting this method to the test by painting my full-size competition plane in the States using the same method. As it turns out, I'm absolutely terrible with auto paint and had all kinds of issues trying to finish this thing that way. So I stripped it and started over using model paints and an airbrush, just as in the article. I will cover everything with auto clear. I have some notes to add to what I wrote in the article:

1. I primed this with regular old Rustoleum 2-in-1 filler/sandable primer (item #260510) and it worked just fine. This is easier to find and cheaper than the Tamiya primer that I recommended in the article. This can be bought at any hardware store for half the price of the Tamiya rattlecan, which is half the volume as well. While I do think the Tamiya primer allows for better adhesion than the Rustoleum, either works fine.

2. I used a more conventional airbrush setup than what I used in the article. In the article I used a USB airbrush I got cheap off of Amazon. For this I used an Iwata Eclipse airbrush connected to a Grex compressor. This was a significantly better setup than what I used in the article. It also costs 10X more than the USB airbrush in the article, so do your own cost-benefit analysis on that one. I don't think I would've spent all the money to buy this setup if I didn't already have it for my plastic modeling.

3. With the modeling compressor I was able to reduce the psi to about 18 compared to the 35 that the USB airbrush had. This allowed me to thin the paint 1:1.

4. Both systems are significantly quieter than the big, loud compressors that the big guns use. Made the entire experience more enjoyable.

5. It was time-consuming! I spent about 6 hours spraying (not including masking) the 4 colors.

6. I experienced several peel-ups with vinyl tape on the Mr. Color paint. I'd say this paint is marginally more resistant to peel-ups than auto paint. But not by much. I experienced no peeling with Tamiya tape.

7. Touchups are dead easy. Put a strip of Tamiya masking tape on the edge of an index card, line it up to the paint break, and shoot a tiny amount from the airbrush. Each touch up gives a clean edge and takes maybe 1 minute.

Here are some pictures of the plane as it sits tonight, after paint and touchups but before graphics and clear.