F14D nose cone painting?

Try sticking it thru a plastic bag or saran wrap. The plastic from the baggie will stretch to a near perfect fit. Stop pushing as you meet the mask line. You can get flexible masking tape "fine line tape" at auto paint stores too. You can cut a mask from thin card also.

Hard lines are usually masked, soft lines may be sprayed freehand with an airbrush (you learn as you go, in this case) or done with "soft masks" - a paper mask which stands off of the surface a tad and allows a bit of overspray of the mask line. The amount of standoff (and how you hold the airbrush - again, you learn as you try) can determine the amount of overspray.

Since you have an airbrush (which will give you more control than a spray can), you could also try it this way - paint the radome the basic aircraft color, and then get an index card and cut a hole in it to fit the line where you'd like the color break to be. Then spray the second color. A draftman's circle template can help for cutting a nice round circle using an X-Acto.

Another way is to use a good flexible masking tape. Smoothly mask the whole area and then use an X-Acto (or single edged razor blade) to cut away the part you wish to expose for painting. Drawing the line onto the tape with a pencil first may also help aid your cut.

Hope it all goes well for you and you son - great to see new builders on the scene. Enjoy.

Hi AC,

Welcome to the club,I'll try to answer some of your questions :

Try cutting a piece of masking tap to a width of just about 1/16" (2 mm) this will be flexible enough to allow you to conform to the rear edge of the nose cone, you can then use wider pieces of tape to fill in behind this line.

Try to use a genuine masking tape as this will stick better than "sellotape" (sorry I'm in the UK and don't know the generic term for this in the US), masking tape will also be less likely to lift any underlying paint off.

To get irregular lines (for camoouflage for example) card masks can be used, try checking out some of the aircraft modelling websites you'll get lots of good advice and tips, together with some inspirational ideas for this fantastic hobby. Take a look here

Hope this helps.

Happy modelling Ant

Try using tape (Tamiya brand is best, or the ordinary household type will do) but sliced into thin strips (a freshly-bladed hobby knife and a steel ruler are needed to do this precisely) about 3 - 5 mm wide.

Generally, the tighter the compound curve to be wrapped around, the thinner the strip of tape needs to be. Once you are satisfied you have a clean edge all the way round, then you can patch other odd pieces of tape behind the first strip, or use a peel-off latex glue to mask behind the line.

One extra piece of advice is to keep the tape slightly under tension - but do not to stretch it - as you wrap around the radome line, and you will get as good a line as the pros. If you mark out periodic points on a scheme where the line has to go - the long cheatlines on airliners, or the boot lines around a ship's hull for instance - you can soon learn to let the tape strip find the smoothest line between 2 points.

Good luck - my son now nearly 20 still keeps his Thunderbirds and ST Voyager kits we made many many years ago. Although he doesn't make any physical kits nowadays, but builds virtual vehicles and spaceships for his PC games. I like to assume there's some connection :)

Thank you for everyone who posted to me about this. My son is 9 years old and loves legos, plastic models,etc.

But one thing for sure, he loves the painted models of armour and aircraft and spaceships at the local hobbyshop. He says they look so cool. Anyways I will be getitng an Aztek 320 airbrush and will do somemore research here before starting off and painting but the tips I recieved are very good. The urls for other websites and tips for painting all help me alot.

Thanks for all your help...all of you!

AC

Chek wrote:

In my experience, the best way to get masking tape to go down smoothly and evenly on a conical surface (like a nose cone) is for it to be cut in a curved shape itself. I use a plastic circle template that has circles of various diameters, and a sheet of glass for a cutting surface. It's pretty much trial and error: choose a diameter that looks right and use it to guide you knife blade as you cut your masking tape (I highly recommend Tamiya masking tape for this: it's very thin and just sticky enough. Thinner tape gives you less paint build-up at the demarcation). Freehand cut a wider diameter to produce a horseshoe-shaped piece of tape. Try it on the nose cone. It'll most likely be too big or too small a diameter. Keep trying with other diameters until you find one that goes around smoothly and evenly. HTH. Pip Moss

in article snipped-for-privacy@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com, nordies snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com at nordies snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote on 12/21/05 1:44 PM: