Well - had small disaster after my last post on this thread. I had hastily put some blue down on the wings, fuselage stripe and engine cowl and then sealed it all in with a clear coat. I wanted the clear to dry as quickly and as hard as possible so being a hot day, I left the model in the afternoon sun out on the garden furniture. This happened to be a very hot day, around 36C and that tends to make dust devils form. Unfortunately the Buffalo thought it was a "real plane" and tried to fly - straight off the outdoor table and onto the concrete path. Result - a separate fuselage and wing section...
These two shots are after I had finished swearing, left it a couple of days (only to avoid the possibility of throwing the remains at the wall) and then went about reattaching the wings and fuselage. To avoid having to refinish the whole aircraft again I decided I would try to use the panel lines as demarcation to limit the scope of work. It kind of worked but there is a slight difference in finish from original to rework - I'm just going to say it represents a field repair!!!!
The next couple of shots are after undercoat and the first layer of silver. It looks a bit rough in these shots and the panel lines have all but disappeared, but I did fix these with later coats of silver and it looks somewhat better than this. You can also see the blue on the engine cowl - I do like how this turned out, its a very pretty blue...
Finally, once I got the repairs to a point I was comfortable with the quality, I set about masking up for the wing decals and the fuselage code letters. As I noted in one of the first posts the decals are pretty much shot, full of cracks and badly stained in places. I measured everything up and cut some masks from Frisket Film. The stars and circles on the wings were reasonably easy to plot out and cut, but the letters represented a bit more of a challenge.
I had a copy of the correct font style as a Windows font file so I spent quite a bit of time with scaling and kerning on the computer to get the letters right. Shape and size wise they are reasonably good, what is not quite right is the spacing. I could have cut the letters/numbers and put them into Adobe or PhotoScape to get it closer, but to be honest I lost patience with it and just printed (in reverse of course) onto the Frisket backing paper so I could cut them out with a nice sharp new blade. The third of the shots above shows the -F- in the middle of the code string. The leading/trailing characters will be black, so they are waiting on the white to dry so they can be uncovered as the white gets covered.
Next job is to place the star masks into the circles and put down some Insignia Blue. Then the black letters I think, followed by the red dots in the middle of the stars. Hoping to get some further progress over Easter as I have done my last Triathlon race for the season and my training regime has backed right off for a couple of weeks (hooray!!!).
Anyway - thanks for looking in. Comments or reactions always welcome.