Thank You Fellas and I appreciate the comments.I looked at her tonight some and played with the new tool it works okay ,I think practice will make perfect.So tomorrow I wll play some if the wife lets me.I am off so tomorrow the tree comes down and decorations but I am taking some more vacation time next week .The other employees are going "how much vacation time do you have?"I work a week or two and take off a week .I am luving it so far after three years of kill'in myself I am starting to relax.Cheers
Well here it goes!The meatballs actually came out pretty nice but the letters and numbers are a 70%.I am going to try to touch them up some but it might be a little tuff seeing my Reefer Orange is very thin.
Thanks Terry,still contemplating in repainting the code.I found my swivel blade last night actually forgot that I had it.If my codes come out better for the sides of the plane I will probably redo the uppers.I am going to cut down some spare glass I have cut the frisket on it then pull out the codes,paint and peel up the frisket.If the results look good onto the plane it goes.This frisket I got could probably be used 5+ times some nice stuff.
I have gotten all of the meatballs done on the girl now and all I can say is that I will probably never use a decal for these again.The codes is another story the second set came out alittle better but still it's hard to make a knife run a straight line and when I want to do a curve she wants to go straight .The tail was painted red and the codes there are decals it seems the white is holding up.i hope it gets me a B on this.....
Excellent Kevin! I know what you mean about trying to cut letter masks - seems however accurate you think you have been, there's always a 'blimp' somewhere!
Thanks guys for the interest there.I still have a wee bit more to go like the running lights behind the real seat,rigging and a couple more decals if they hold up and some weathering if I can figure out in what regards. Cheers
I do not know if any of you guys are interested in doing your own insignia out there but this was really quite easy.I show here a setup of the tools I used a ruler,hobby knife,double bladed compass knife,swivel blade knife and circle template.Now for you to replicate the images you need to get frisket paper(good stuff),tracing paper,carbon paper and a glass plate 6X6 inches is good.Once I found out that my decals were junk after to many tears of storage I I started tracing the decals out do this using a small ruler and the circle template if needed.The next step was to to pull out the glass plate(could be ceramic tile also) and too adhere the frisket paper to it lightly,tape the carbon paper and then your trace pattern all taped dowm important!I used a toothpick to get the outline onto the frisket paper once that is accomplished you can go ahead and reveal your frisket paper.The ruler and circle template come out again to make your cuts if you have curves use the swivel blade knife otherwise use the straight bladed knife.That is how I made my last set of codes which came out pretty good.
Now you might wonder what the green patches of tape are for?Will they are used for making the insignia.I found that it took three layers of tape to make a good anchoring point for the compass bladed knife.I again went to the kit decals and got a pretty close approximation of the radius of the circle in this the inner circle first.I adhere the frisket paper over the patch of tape mark it with a small dot incase of a slip and commence to cutting.Now the inner circle is complete I open the compass a bit while not removing it from the patch and cut again.It was important that I kept the insignia kits matched just incase I was off just a tad off on the diameters from one to one.I painted the red first and after about 45 minutes came back and applied the inner circle centered and sprayed the white.Easy!The insignia you may imagine took all of maybe 5 minutes to draw out.The last set of codes took maybe 15 minutes to draw and cut out.I hope this may take some of the scare factor out for some of ya'll out there for I know I did not want to try it but I can see wereas I will be using this more in the future.Cheers
PS:the last pic shows all my templates and you can use these over and over if you get some good frisket paper but again keep the kits matched
The rigging is all but complete and I have but four small parts to add and she is done.I need an opinion though should I weather this one or leave it as is?I ask for I took it to the LHS today and Joe and Nancy were both impressed with the subject and color scheme and noted that they would like for it to be displayed there.I display stuff there from time to time but they really wanted an unusual subject as this for display and they seem to like as is.If weathering is what you think I need ideas of where and maybe how?
and by the way can a mod add my kill markings back for the bottom of my post all those first place finishes I have thks
Unless you have pics of how it looked in 'real life', I think I'd leave it as it is. Nice to see a model looking 'ordinary' for a change, as if either fairly new, well looked after, or just after being cleaned, instead of weathered to h*ll to like so many done these days, so it'll look good on display.