Thanks guys. Terry, I was not planning to use tape to rip off the paint. My concern was that the tape I used to mask for the Dark Earth would do just that when I removed it in a rather unplanned fashion.
Anyway, all went well, except that upon removing the tape, which thankfully did not lift the paint at the hairsprayed areas, there were a few spots where the darker brown got under the tape but generally I was happy with the result. The Dark Earth was, again, an old bottle of PolyScale and this was cut about 20% with Medium Sea Grey to bleach out the colour. Here are pics taken immediately after the tape was removed, including some of the areas that need to be fixed.
Once the tape was off, I immediately set about removing paint chips. For this, I used an old brush with the bristles cut back to about 2mm, dipping in water and rubbing back and forth and in circles until the paint started to come off to reveal the aluminum underneath. Unsurprisingly, more effort was needed to remove the Dark Earth paint as this had a coat of Middle Stone under it. After the paint chipping was done, I started to add a little weathering by brushing on some different colours. The reddish brown you see over the Middle Stone looks nowhere near as bright in real life. Something in the camera is making it stand out a lot.
So now the model has been given a coat of Future for the decals and I'll let it marinate for at least 24 hours before doing any more on it. I'm off to Nanton tomorrow to work on the Merlin and may do a bit of work on the Lightning tomorrow evening, depending on my mood. Thanks for watching.