Moon Bus part 9 completed.

I had a bit of a disaster in the painting process which is something I always dread.
The big problem was the paint, top coat and primer just came straight off the black styrene as soon as any masking tape even low-tack got anywhere near it. It flaked off in sheets. It was very depressing.

 

It all had to be scraped off where the masking was eventually going to be placed, to be re-primed and top coated.  Strangely the dodgy primer stuck much better to the parts made from white styrene like the evergreen textured sheet, though small bits were still pulled off with any masking tape application. In these areas I did what I usually do and applied some hair dryer heat to the masking tape as I removed it which aids in softening the gum and preventing small chips coming off.

I did a bit of research to try and figure out why this occurred as it has happened to me randomly in the past. Sometimes the primer is absolutely perfectly fine and very occasionally I find it comes away with the masking. I found a very useful bit of information on you tube about the types of primer I usually use, namely car primer in an aerosol can.

Turns out there are two types available to me locally one good and one bad and I had three cans with both types represented. I sprayed the three different cans I had in sections over some black styrene and after it had dried applied some masking tape. Pulling the masking tape away was extremely revealing. The primer I had used came completely off and the other two had remained intact. The picture below shows the three cans I tested.

 The can on the left was the one I used on this model which failed miserably. The other two behaved as one would hope, they stayed on the surface. It turns out the cans that say Multi Surface work very well on plastic, they even state they work on fibreglass on the back. The one that is labelled acrylic primer appears to be absolutely useless on plastic and therefore I will not use it ever again.

Before this all happened I had decided on a predominantly white finish with some sort of red stripes to match the red on the chassis. Below is the model with the base colour applied which I took into photoshop and tried out a number of various versions of red accents finally deciding on the colour rough shown in the second picture which helped to highlight the shape left between the panels that flow around the windows.

This red motif was then masked up extremely gingerly and sprayed with a small can of Ford Blaze red. The white was actually a warm off white called Antarctic white. Once that was done I re-evaluated the front end and decided that maybe the front panel needed some colour as well. So back to photoshop just to check and the colour rough that resulted shown in the second photo below was more to my liking.

My old weathering technique using a mix of Tamiya flat black and ethanol ( methylated spirits) as a dirty wash was employed. The surface is then cleaned off using a rag damp with ethanol leaving the grunge in the crevices. Dry brushing with a light grey students acrylic followed. Detailed scrapes were painted with acrylic hobby paints, a light grey surround with a dark grey core.

Another of the painting tasks was to paint the occupant figures, something I am pretty terrible at. In an attempt to try and improve in this area I watched a lot of You tube videos on figure painting in acrylics. Below is the result, still pretty poor but a lot better than my previous attempts.

The figures were superglued into their seats and the front panel screwed into position. To hide the screw heads I found a piece of red self adhesive vinyl and punched out some small circles that were pretty much the same diameter as the screw holes. The colour is not an exact match but I think it will do the job. I also used a few pieces of the red vinyl in other places on the model.

The solar panel cells on top were picked out with random squares in three shades of grey.

Finally here is the completed model.

  

Part 1 of this project was way back in October 2014. Part 2, 3 and 4 was a year later in October 2015. Then nothing until 2020. This project has been spread over nearly 6 years so it is satisfying to finally bring it to completion. It's also the third completed model for 2020 which as we all know has been and continues to be a very unusual and challenging year.

Thanks for looking.

More soon...

Push Lights AKA eliptical vessel heads

I have mentioned these push lights many times in a few project build posts but never shown a picture of one. Well a question on the RPF forum prompted a little further explanation of what exactly they are.

I get them from my local Hardware store, in this case in Western Australia the store is a Bunnings.
They come in two sizes the larger shown below in the packaging is 115mm across the dome part not including the outer rim. The smaller one comes two to a packet and are 80mm across the dome.

They are molded from a hard styrene and you can see that to use them as a communications dish there is a side that needs to be cut away. They can be easily disassembled by removing some screws on the back.

I have used the surrounds as well as the dome part on a few models. In fact the top of the Resilient has one of the small sized surrounds in front of the antennae array. You can see the round shape to the left of the light blue piece on the top spine below.

 I have used one of the larger domes and their surround cut in half on the back of the as yet unfinished Moon Bus project.

And once again a smaller dome was used for the communications dish.

They are relatively cheap to buy and provide some useful shapes. I have even used the led lights that are contained within them on a model.

Be wary though of a cheaper and nastier version made of poly propylene a type of plastic that cannot be glued painted or sanded so is of no value to a modeller. These tend to have a black surround.

Thanks for looking.
More soon...

Resilient cruiser part 7

I have flipped the model over and resumed working on the top again.
I have been trying to finish the communications tower and I think it's done.
I sprayed some grey primer just to make sure.
The whole communication tower assembly has been made removable for safer transport in the future. It has a number of small and fragile antenna arrays.
It is held onto the model with a strong magnet near the front and a small lip that mates with a tab at the rear.

Thanks for looking.
More soon...

Kong Head Toybash part 3

At the end of the last post I decided to add a few more nurnies to the front of the cab and have now done so completing the construction process by finalising the primer.

Then it was into photoshop to come up with a suitable colour scheme. I wanted to go bold with the colours for this truck and looked over a number of vehicle concept art pictures I have collected from the internet for inspiration. Here's what I arrived at as a very rough paintover of the primered side view;

I went to the auto parts shop and purchased some spray cans in the appropriate colours. The first can I tried was an old one that had been sitting on the shelf for quite some time. On pressing the trigger an ooze of thick goo came out of the nozzle. I shook it up some more and tested the spray on a piece of wood and it seemed to come good so I started spraying the model... the spray coming out was not a fine mist but a series of thick blobs. I tried the other similar colour I purchased and it was a newer can and sprayed a perfectly fine mist. So one side ended up with a thick textured finish and the other was more like I was expecting. This ended up causing me problems as the too thick acrylic lacquer paint and the perfectly fine primer will start coming straight of the styrene when you pull off the masking tape. It seems to dissolve the primer styrene bond interface and the stuff will almost fall off which it did in several places. Everytime I removed some masking I had to repair the paint, the model needed and got more and more heavily weathered through the process. The other issue is that I am trying to complete this model and at least another before exhibiting them at the Perth SupaNova event coming up in nearly a week and a half, so there is a deadline. I am taking some holidays before the show to get them done and I dont need any more disasters besides the fact thet the weather has not been conducive to paint drying.

The model is now pretty much done except for a voltage booster board from Hobby King to power the 12 volt lighting from a 7.2 volt battery. I have had the board on back order for a number of months and still no show.

Here is the result of the last few days;

On to the next model for completion.
More soon...