Thanks Hugh. The black camo continues with the tricky issue of applying the blu-tac to the sides. I say tricky because the stuff wouldn't stick so I had to be very careful that the airbrush didn't blow the mask around. I think this was due to rolling the stuff on an unclean surface.
Here is the resulting line which I think turned out pretty good:
For the black, I used Tamiya XF-85 Rubber Black which is slightly grayer than pure black. I chose this as I didn't want the stark finish of pure black. The nose area had to be done freehand as I just couldn't get the blu-tac to hold. This was a tough area to get at and resulted in a pretty messy line. It didn't help that the brush was getting a bit fouled by this point and splattered a bit.
This just would not do so I went over the area with the gray again and straightened the line out:
Next it was on to the spinners which Terry kindly supplied from his old Airfix kit. As stated earlier the Revell spinners are very oddly shaped so I discarded these. Unfortunately, the replacements were slightly too large in diameter at the backplate and had to be corrected. At first I tried filing and sanding but I was getting nowhere. So I rigged up the below "lathe" by drilling through the back plate and nose and CA gluing the assembly to the bit. With the drill clamped into a vice and locked on, this allowed me to remove material quicker and more uniformly using a file held against the turning spinner.
Of course, the downside was that I now have a hole in the front of the spinner which I need to deal with. This is a simple matter of gluing in a tapered but of sprue which will be cut off and shaped.
With the major painting done, I now have some touch-ups to do before applying a clear coat. I still don't like the canopy joint (which you can see in the above close-ups) and will try cleaning that up. Also, when removing the masking, I pulled up a small piece of filler which left an unsightly blemish which I'll show you later before I repair it.
Thanks for looking in guys. Only a couple of months late!