Hi all
The following is a sad story as to why I am now adverse to using Day-Glo orange paint, except in small areas.
It started off quite innocently when I purchased a cheap spray can of Day-Glo orange (151 brand i think) in my local pound store to try out. Experiments on test pieces seemed promising and as a result Mrs Lady Mog challenged me to make an orange coloured model. After some research I settled on making a QF-104 Starfighter drone which was bright orange, white, gray and silver. Easy-peasy or so I thought.
I had a Matchbox F-104 in the stash which was typical of its day, two coloured sprues (light blue/white), minimal detail but generally good in shape. The Sidewinder missiles were missing but that wasn’t a problem because I was fitting some wing tip tanks from the spares box.
The fit of the parts wasn’t brilliant but nothing a bit of filler wouldn’t sort out, up to the primer stage everything went fine and then it came to the final coat.
The first coat went on OK but it didn’t cover very well, second and third coats were no better and it was beginning to discolour at certain edges, the colour appearing to darken. I stopped at this point as alarm bells were beginning to ring in my head.
Now I had put no more paint on the model than I would with any other paint but it took more than 3 days to dry properly and the results were not good. This paint has no “cover” and every little fault/anomaly/shade difference shows through, woe betide if any particles were picked up during the spraying process as they just screamed “dust!”.
My normal fix of careful sanding was useless here. Sanding would reduce some of the blemishes but that then caused the colour to lighten and I could not spray this out because the paint wouldn’t cover!
I found this out two cans down the line.
Fortunately some of the faults were covered by the white, silver and light gray elements of the paint scheme.
In desperation I purchased some acrylic Day-Glo orange (Revell) but that had no cover either and resulted in a patchy finish.
It is at this point I hit the “Soddit Barrier”.
If I had not promised Mrs Lady Mog an orange aircraft the whole lot would have been tossed into the Box of Doom.
Also the chap I bought the model from was genuinely interested in how his ex kits turned out which would have made me feel a bit guilty if I had binned it.
Instead I adopted a “just get the bloody thing done" attitude
The tip tanks were badly blotched and were sanded back and re-primed. By this time I had had enough of the rattle can so I painted these with a brush. It took eight to ten thin coats to get an acceptable finish.
The orange could not be painted directly onto the canopy that had to be framed in white first, as was the touching up around the canopy and wheel doors. The doors are way too thick but by now I couldn’t be bothered to correct this.
Eventually I did get it finished.
by
Robomog, on Flickr
by
Robomog, on Flickr
by
Robomog, on Flickr
by
Robomog, on Flickr
by
Robomog, on Flickr
by
Robomog, on Flickr
It doesn’t look too bad in the photos. In fact the colour had its last laugh because I found it very difficult to photograph the faults. I can see lots of paint faults with my eyes but the camera makes it look pristine (nevertheless I know they are there !).
by
Robomog, on Flickr
You can see in the above a fine ridge and discolouration around the canopy, had to really play with the light to show this
by
Robomog, on Flickr
In this close up you can see the mess around the undercarriage doors
In retrospect I could have hidden a lot of the faults under “weathering” They didn’t look after the QF-104's much and they faded quite badly in the sun, but it didn’t occur to me at the time.
And that is why I’m now wary of Day-Glo orange finishes.
On the upside Mrs Lady Mog thought it had come out great so it will appear on the Wall of Joy
In conclusion, Some advice to the uninitiated :-
- make sure your primer coat is pristine before applying the finish coat.
- Apply the finish coat in many thin layers
- Let each layer dry thoroughly
- Make the spraying environment as dust free as possible
Or
Choose an alternative colour scheme ! You have been warned............
Thanks for looking....
Mog
>^-.-^<