2010 July

Summer Project: Painting

July 1st, 2010

I wasn’t too thrilled about starting on the painting. I used to paint miniatures, so my sense of scale is drastically different. It’s also a massive mentality shift. When painting miniatures, if I messed up I could just put another coat of paint on the error. RC cars, on the other hand, are painted on the inside to protect the paint, which means the first paint on a spot wins.

The first step was easy: clean the mold.

I started with the wheels so I could attach them and take it for a test drive (I’ll comment more on the test drive later, but suffice it to say there were lessons learned at the expense of my wife’s garden). After playing around with the fitting of the spokes, I figured I could do a two color approach if I offset the inner and outer pieces. The inner pieces were sprayed green:

One thing I didn’t expect was for the spray paint smell to be so strong. We have a two car garage, so I expected to be able to leave the garage door closed. I was woozy before I finished the first side. Once they dried, getting them into the tire was a challenge. Twenty minutes and a lot of cursing later, I had the wheels assembled and attached.

Now that the easy part was done, I had to wrap my head around the masking process. Thankfully, the model came with window masks, so I didn’t need to fit them myself to keep the windows transparent.

The flame masks weren’t quite as tricky as I expected. There were some little bubbles around the edges I couldn’t completely get out, but again I needed to get out of the miniatures mentality and start to think more in terms of the project at hand. Plus, I’ll inevitably drive the damn thing into a wall the first time I drive it and mess the body up anyway, so being anal retentive about barely visible paint blurs is a bit of a moot point.