Workstation
To avoid all the ashes from the wildfire and all the bug bites on my leg, I decided to move my workstation indoors.
I got myself a new spray booth with a stronger fan and a quieter air compressor.
Repair
I noticed few of my primed pieces didn't have a nice smooth glossy finish as they were supposed to.
These are the parts that were very poorly sanded with 600 grit. I've been reading that 600 is generally fine but I suspect the cheap sanding sponge I was using was probably little more coarse than its labe. So I decided to try re-sanding them.
Here is what the piece looked like after re-sanding with 400 grit. This was mostly to remove the primer layer off of the plastic.
I then took 600, 800, 1000, 2000 grit sanding pads and lightly sanded off the surface from low grit to high grit.
And here we have what it looked like after I finished with the 2000 grit. For most glossy finish purposes, 800 grit is supposed to be sufficient but since I'm doing candy coating (where small flaws are extra noticeable), I decided to go up to 2000 grit.
Here is a comparison shot using another piece:
On the left, we have a piece that was coated with glossy black primer after sanding with 600 grit. You can see it has lot of bumps and the surface does not look smooth and glossy.
On the center, we have a piece that was sanded with 2000 grit. Even before adding primer, you can see the piece looks much smoother than the piece on the left.
On the right, we have the piece from the center coated with the same primer used on the left. The surface is smooth and glossy enough to see my own reflection on it.
Airbrushing
For base color, I divided the pieces up in two categories: chrome group and gunmetal group.
First group consists of pieces that will be candy coated red and yellow along with pieces that will be coated plain chrome. This first group will be painted chrome for base layer.
The chrome color from Vallejo Metal Colors series came out very nicely. It had a much nicer metallic look than the generic silver color from the model color line. It didn't have the nice mirror-level sheen like lacquer based paints (i.e. Alclad II) but I imagine this was the best I was going to get using acrylic paints.
The second group is the darker pieces that will be coated gunmetal. Aside from some parts that needs to be masked and have split colors, these pieces will only have the base layer and the top coat.
The gunmetal color from Tamiya didn't have a nice metallic look like the chrome paint I was using for chrome. I'm contemplated on whether I should stick with glossy black finish but I decided to just see through the gunmetal finish to the end.
Scribing
I just want to take a moment to show how badly scribing failures show up once you start coloring metallic colors.
This is the piece that I tried to cover up the scribing mistakes by just sanding it off during the last progress report. In fact, this piece was one of the pieces I had to undo my first primer coat because it didn't have a smooth surface. I even went through the effort to lightly repair the scratches using a super glue (still have no epoxy putty). Everything looked ok after I primed it again after the repair but this is how it looked once I applied the chrome layer.
Hopefully I'll get some more practicing with scribing and can improve for next time.
Today I Learned
- Always be diligent with sanding - no skipping out!
- Scribing failures can be really bad on metallic colors
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