Terry, it just occurred to me why the colours look off on the outdoor pics. I had the camera set for tungsten lighting for my basement pics and forgot to set it for sunlight. The below pics should show the truer colours.
A few posts ago when I talked about the masking sequence, I mentioned that the MD 280 s/n would have to be sprayed on after rather than painted as a white background first then over-sprayed. This sequence of pics might hopefully show you why.
Here's the mask as it appears on the backing sheet. Had I painted the white first, I would have had to apply and align a myriad of tiny pieces. The chances of getting these to come out perfectly were, in my mind, pretty slim.
The trick now was to get the full mask off the backing without tearing the delicate lines that were to remain after the numerals were removed. For this, I measured the mask outline and cut a piece of tape the exact size of the mask. I then pealed off the entire mask in one piece and lined up the tape with the mask and stuck it to the model using the conveniently provided panel line.
Then it was a matter of carefully pealing back the tape whilst ensuring that the proper bits of mask remained. As it turned out, this painters tape was too tacky and it pulled off the bits that I had intended to carefully removed using a sharp blade.
This is the vinyl mask with all applicable bits removed.
And here's the final outcome which I'm pretty happy with. These close up pics reveal a few very tiny potential touch ups but they are hardly visible to the naked eye so I may just leave them.
That's it for the mask work. I'm very satisfied with this first attempt at using these and would recommend these masks (Ad Astra Masks) to anyone who can not find decals for a scheme that they would like to depict. I think this company will make custom ones if you ask but I don't know the price. The production masks I used were comparable in price to an after market decal sheet so quite reasonable.
Hope this showed you something a little different as a technique and thanks once again for looking in.