Thommo

Thanks again Jim - I'll take all that on board. One question - in 1/48 scale, will the info you wrote on doing faces/hands still be relevant. Will the figures be a bit small to notice? cheers Thommo

Many thanks Jim - I can feel a trip to the hobby store for oil paints coming on :lol: When you get a chance, I'd love to hear about painting uniforms. Thommo

P-47 drop tank, hardpoints and 1/48 figures from Kevin (Smithery) all the way from sunny Canada to sunny but bloody cold Oz (9 degrees C here today)- thanks mate, can finish the plane now. :lol: Thommo

Thanks guys - some good tips there. Godfrey, those links are great. Jim - regarding what paint, I was hoping to get away with using my model paints (acrylics - Tamiya, MM, Gunze) or enamels (Humbrol). I do have a few tubes of artists oils though (eg burnt umber, white, some blues etc). I use the oils exclusively for doing panel washes on planes and usually just thin them with turpentine. I do find though sometimes they have tiny little lumps in the thinned mix which need removing. Is there anything better to thin them with to get a smoother mix? I am eagerly awaiting lesson No.2 !!! Th

I get my blue-tac at places like K-mart in the stationery section or at the newsagent. Aminx - you might be asking something different than the replies you got so far assuming you are airbrushing? Sometimes on start-up, the airbrush spits specs of paint which go where you don't want. This is usually due to the tip not being screwed in tight enough (esp in an Aztec), improper thinning or an airbrush blockage. Thommo

I am approaching the point with my D-day diorama where I will need to paint some 1/48 figures (pilot & groundcrew). This will be an entirely new task for me, so I'm looking for any tips you might have on how to make them look realistic (eg shading, skin tones to use, eyes :D etc etc). The P-47 is nearly done and stands on its prop beautifully thanks to the thumping great lead sea-sinker blu-taced behind the engine. This required adding fusewire locating pins to strengthen the wheels though. I'll post a progress pic soon - a few touches still needed and waiting for Smitherys drop tank

Since I started using the black nozzle (instead of the fine tan one) with my Aztec with acrylics (MM, Tamiya, Gunze), my oft mentioned clogging problems have all but disappeared :lol: . I am thinning my paints about 50:50 with Tamiya thinner. Yet the black nozzle allows me to spray finer and with much more control than the tan ever did ???? I am dissassembling the tip much less frequently now. To clean, I now just spray out all the paint, spray water thru it till clear, take tip off and wash in bowl of water, submerge end of airbrush & cup intake hole in bowl and press/pull trigger to

My advice from starting with a tyre - don't go there, buy a compressor Thommo

I know the feeling John - things were going perfectly on my P-47 - even the extensive invasion stripes came out near perfect. Then......... I added the (Monogram-Revel) decals - I knew it was a risk, but thought Micro-sol would make the thick buggers bed down, but alas no. So I had to remove then with micro-set and toothpick and scratched up my nice fuselage stripes AARRGGHHHH :lol: I then had to do some re-masking/re-spraying which tore my fuselage code letter decals (these from the spares box and went on perfectly of course), requiring patching of the code with little bits of white dec

Wildthing Here are those pics of how I masked my P-47 canopies. The windshield was masked & attached, the sliding rear section masked & I will attach when all is finished. Note the wet tissue stuffed in cockpit and piece of masking tape to stop overspray getting inside windshield. Note masking tape inside rear caopy to protect from overspray. cheers Thommo

Hi Tom Stretched sprue works great. I've been using it for ages. With the stretching over the candle, I still seem to snap 4 bits for every bit that works, but just hang in there till you get a good one. Re adding canopy before painting - I just started doing that about 6 months ago and it is the way to go. I do it like this (before starting, I have already masked cockpit with wet tissue): 1. Future canopy if you want (i tend not to or do it after painting as I found I had tape adhesion probs otherwise - but that might be cos of the type of tape i use) 2. Mask with magic (scotch) tape a

I agree T-bolt - that is a really nice display eye-spy. That Camel is a beauty. I gave up on the nylon thread (and fishing line) for rigging cos I found I could get much better results and a tighter bond with stretched sprue. It never seems to sag once tight. If I apply a wire and it looks a bit floppy, I have a straightned out paper clip held in a wooden peg which I heat in a candle then carefully place under the sag - it tightens up perfectly, but you have to be careful not to get too close or you will snap the sprue. Practice makes perfect on this. Thommo

I use exactly the same combination of gloss x22, thinner 20A and an Aztek. In fact I gloss coated my P-47d with it last night. I'm not sure what you mean by 'frosty' - do you mean it looks sort of whiteish instead of clear? One thing I noticed last night is I did not quite thin it enough, so I did not get a really even thin coating. It sort of looks a bit 'sparkly' (maybe that is what you call frosty) but I think I can fix that by giving it a good polish with a lint free cloth and perhaps another v thin coat. I've never had that opaque milky thing happen though that Simon mentions? It do

I'm an idiot too cos I did exactly the same with the invasion stripes on a Mustang once - but a coat of Tamiya flat clear fixed it. (but I have an inkling some of those invasion stripes were sort of semi-gloss anyway, which is how mine turned out with just a light coat of flat). It is v easy to do and now whenever I grab the flat black bottle out of the little lunch box I store my paints in, I do a double check for that XF label. The other similar mistiake I made was with Tamiya smoke for exahust stains - it is also a gloss, not a flat as I had assumed. As for stripping it - I wouldn't go

I'm with you. Spent hours on w/end masking invasion stripes on P-47 then spraying white (black comes later). What a pain. I built it up in several coats, set it aside for a few hours then recoated. It probably has 4-5 coats on it. Then I had to pick/sand out specs of dust etc, do a little sanding and polish with a soft cloth between some coats. But I did discover one good thing - Gunze flat white does not clog in my Aztec at all !!! Tamyia flat white always did. But I seemed to getter a more even colour with the Tamyia and required many more coats with the Gunze to achieve something si

Peter - very interesting. So you squirt the thinner in where the tip screws into the airbrush body (ie between the coloured plastic bit on the tip and that chrome coloured collar on the front of the airbrush body)? cheers Thommo

Fair Dinkum? I didn't realise that. I will definitely have to try that. But how is that different than having the paint cup full of lacquer thinner? And when you refer to Lacquer, you mean the opposite to acyrlic thinner (ie lacquer thinner is what you use to thin enamels as opposed to acrylics). I have never been clear on what lacqyer means. Thommo

Hmmmmm - I've had exactly the same probs with mine & it has always been a cleaning issue. If it works fine with another tip, then the tip is the problem & I try the following: 1. Completely dissassemble the coloured nozzle, clean inside all bits with a twisted up tissue dipped in thinner, twisting it around. I even (gently) swivel a toothpick dipped in thinner up inside that white bit after removing the needle & often much crap comes out. 2. Use my fine dentists tool to ensure the hole in the white insert (the bit the needle goes into) is clear. 3. Clean the needle off. When

Yup, this is definitely a blockage. Mine did the same once & I stupidly took the cap off & tried again & guess what, I got an eyeful of paint. Keep trying all the numerous cleaning tips that have been posted on this site. Start with seeing if the tiny hole where the needle comes out of is blocked and work back from there. Another thing - when you get it unclogged, make sure that little vent hole in the cap is unblocked else it won't spray properly. Thommo

Yes, I often do this by airbrushing a slightly lighter shade of the top camo colours in the centre of some panels. I usually create the lighter shade by mixing in a bit of white with the base colour. A thin wash of white sounds a bit risky to me but perhaps it would work if it were very thin. I would not do it over a brown/green camo, but over a blue it might be OK. Thommo

Yeah, you can but it ain't pretty. I did it last night. Got into my P-47 after a couple of red wines. I made a mess of both the sway braces I was scratch building and my fingers - jammed both the exacto & drill thru fingers and the sway braces kept flying out of the tweezers, never to be seen again. Only reason my wife tolerated my tirade of swearing was that she was having similar problems with her knitting - lucky the kids were asleep, it was getting ugly. Thommo

Eng I have a Sparmax mini compressor for my Aztec airbrush - cost be about $265 Aus. It has px guage, moisture trap, adjustable psi, good long flexible hose & is so quite I use it in the same room as where the family watch TV. I just set it at about 20psi and do all my spraying (acrylic, some enamels) at that pressure. I'm probably supposed to change pressure sometimes, but im too lazy to muck with it. I'm not sure what you mean about pulsing? I've don't think that's happened to me. And i hardly ever need to empty the water trap - maybe once every 6 months & then it only has ab

I fully agree Flores - once I started using Tamyia primer, my acrylics stuck to the model much better. Johno - that is a great tip about warming the spraycan first - I will have to do that cos i have found it hard to get a fine spray. Thommo

That's not a warp, it's an excocet strike ! I'd take it back and ask for a replacement as I can't see how that is fixable within the usual limits of modeler sanity. <_< Thommo

Bob You'll probably need half to one cup for the underside and same for the topside (if topside is just one colour). If topside is 2 colour camo, then maybe half a cup per colour (sorry, 1/2 = half, not one to two and 3/4 = three quarters, not three to four) The only spraycan I have used is the primer & I was amazed at how smooth the paint went on for such a coarse weapon ! The advantage of using an airbrush is you can get a much finer paint stream (eg down to say 2-3mm wide), rather than the broad blast I got from the can (which must be about 50mm wide). So, with the airbrush you can