Hello Everyone,
No, I was not abducted by aliens, but I was abducted by one of our clients at work and dragged overseas for a while. Now that's done I can get back to the important stuff.
Being far away from all my toys, I haven't gotten much done. I finished laying decals for the plywood on the interior. I had repainted everything from tan to white so these see through decals would look better...
I think it's looking much better with a white base. Now when I went to seal the decals with some varnish I used Vallejo satin varnish straight from the bottle. I like this stuff ok, but it doesn't go on very smooth, it's expensive for such a small bottle, and I think I need to keep looking for better stuff because when I went to mask over it, this happened...
The tape lifted the varnish so easily that a slight bump of the tape made it come right off. It's likely due to the decals not holding on to the varnish, but this could cause serious issues on other projects. Most of all, I am now without a way to seal large decals and it worries me about how to seal the outside of the plane when I do those decals. Anyone have any advice here? What types of varnish have you used to cover your wood decals?
After a few colorful words I moved on with the interior. I decided to finally glue the interior to one half of the fuselage and continue with interior details. I also put down a filter over the plywood to give it a little age and wear.
I'm finally happy with the petrol tanks and added the decals and started with the plumbing after gluing them in. I finally received the rivet decals in the mail from HWG. I really like the products from these guys. They are cheaper than Uschi, and the quality is really close, if not the same, or even a little better. The only problem is it takes over a month to get an order from them. The rivets are so tiny it's doubtful they will be seen, but I wanted to give them a try and see how they work.
The carrier film is rather difficult to get off, it's still on in the picture, but once it's off and the rivets are sealed, they look great.
As a last bit of work for this session, it's more detail painting on the engines. These little gems are going to be quite colorful. There's so many different colors on the pictures of the originals, and I may be getting away from how they are supposed to look on the version of the plane I'm doing, but I'm a rebel who likes to do what looks best as opposed to what it's supposed to be in reality. I'm toying with the idea of a diorama where the plane was battle damaged and one of the engines is being replaced. Since Wing Nut was so kind to send me an entire engine for one broken part, I'll likely do one as it's supposed to look, and another that is more factory fresh that wasn't painted with the Battleship Gray when the plane was first built.
So I'm glad to be back home and working on my project. I hope you like the progress, but honestly I'm running into so many problems with the interior, I'm beginning to have second thoughts about opening up the framework on the top to let viewers see the inside better. We'll see how things continue. Maybe I will, maybe I won't.
