I have four models all painted with latex exterior grade house paint. Since these models also are glow powered I followed the paint with a coat of Nelson clear, then decals, then a final coat of clear (with cross linker). The paint works great and Sherwin Williams has been able to mix to my color chips with amazing results.

Give it a try and you won't use expensive model airplane paint again.

Fred C.

great plane . whats it weigh? and would a could a good gas motor be ? what plans did ya use? are the wings hollow?

  whats a    koku fan

There are several sources for 3-views of aircraft, one of them is from Koku-fan from Japan, they probably have the best 3-views available with good line quality and have good outlines that match the photographs of the real airlplanes. I will use a Koku-Fan 3-views over any other 3-view when building a model. Another good source is the Paul Matt 3-views, his drawings were based on actual measurements of real aircraft, his two books are worth gettng. Before buildng a model from a 3-view make sure the 3-view is correct, look at photographs of the real aircraft and ask yourself is this 3-view correct?

As an example there is a 3-view from the 1949 time time frame for the B-29 and the vertical tail is completely wrong, does not even match the photographs of the real aircraft. Remember you can not draw your own 3-view for scale competition, and you must pick a 3-view that best represents the version of your aircraft.

Always get a 3-view that matches your version of the model, if you are building a P-51D, don't show a 3-view of a P-51A or P-51H, they have different outlines.

Get hold of Bob Banka at and ask him if there are any Koku-Fan 3-views for the aircraft you are interested in. Once you see a Koku-Fan 3-view you will understand.

http://www.bobsairdoc.com/

I cut my own foam wings with a very bow that I made myself.

Here's one R/C scale warbird I saw on another forum (not quite finished but flyable). The guy cannot work with aggressive chemicals, so he paints his electrics with latex. His building technique is wooden skeletons skinned with foam sheet.

He mentioned that, with latex, he has to keep cleaning his spray gun a lot.

I got a reply back from the owner of Nelson Hobby Paints and he still has the cross linker.

This is my new Great Planes RV-4 with Latex house paint. The G-CEVC is a vinyl decal, the white on the fuselage and wing were painted on.

Build a paint stand it makes things much easier to deal with. I made this Paint stand with about $15 buck worth of steel pipe and used an old mount for a table saw. This held the entire RV-4 and allowed me to turn it while I painted the entire model without touching the model.

Fred C.