Made some headway last night. Here is what I have done so far.
I needed to relocate the spine antenna under the nose before painting commenced. The bottom of the kit part is flat so I dipped it in flat black and used it as a stamp to mark its location under the nose. This gave me a nice guide of how big to make the hole.
I drilled a hole at each end of the marked spot with a pin vise and carefully carved out the remaining material with my x-acto. This worked pretty well and dry fitting as I went along got me a pretty close fit, hopefully not needing any filler as I plan to place the antenna after l finish painting.
Everything prepped and ready for primer!
Everything now has a coat of Alclad black micro filler/primer. I had trouble getting a nice smooth finish with this stuff and only discovered afterwards what the biggest culprit could be.
While spraying I was getting air bubbles gurgling in my paint cup and and a sputtering sound as I sprayed, but no obvious splatters or interruption in paint flow. After painting, I disassembled my airbrush, an Iwata HP-CS, and cleaned everything yet again. Nothing was severely dirt or gunked up anywhere. I did some troubleshooting via YouTube and of course the fix was stupid simple. I had not been screwing the tip on tight enough ensuring a good seal and not seating the brass cone enough. Oh well, lesson learned.
The finish left something to be desired and I believe my error was allowing the primer to partially dry before it even hit the surface due to my air leak, no matter the distance or air pressure I used (10-12 psi btw). I had "soot" all over the airframe, so wiped the loose dust off with a paper towel and IPA. I then gave the whole airframe a light sanding with fine grit sand paper and wiped everything down again with a cotton rag and IPA. I now had a semi Matt finish, but at least it was blemish and lint/dust free. This was no big deal as I planned to apply MM gloss black enamel as a finish coat prior to the alclad aluminum anyways.
With my airbrush now tuned correctly I proceeded to fill the paint cup with the gloss black and added thinner to get the consistency I desired. I did a couple test sprays on some paper towel and noticed I was getting micro blobs of paint, not a fine mist. What? I then looked at my pipette that I had transferred the paint with sitting in its tub of water that I keep it in while painting to keep the paint from drying until I am finished painting and then clean up afterwards. It was surrounded by greasy black blobs floating around it as if the Exxon-Valdez had just crashed into my rinse container. Then it hit me. In my haste I had forgotten that I was using enamel (I almost exclusively use acrylics) and had used acrylic thinner for thinning and out of habit just placed my pipette in water. Long story short, I dumped the paint, flushed everything with lacquer thinner and started over, this time using tamiya lacquer thinner to thin the paint. It worked beautifully. Now I am waiting for it to finish curing so I can sand out a couple random dust specs and the air intake under the belly where I had accidentally set it down while the paint was still wet. I have to get some new sanding sticks today and the paint probably won't be cured enough to sand it until tomorrow.
Anyways, a few pictures and a misadventure short story. Hope that will be enough to entertain you guys until I can get back at it again. I don't want to rush this and spoil the finish, but I gotta tell ya, it's like watching paint dry.
Happy modelling
Chad