MarkusN

Actually you still need quite a large radius to mask a propeller spinner. The mask you need is an ARC, that lies snugly around a cone. In fact it probably is possible to use a straigt strip cut from a slightly elastic tape (think insulation tape) and lay that around the spinner under slight tension.

Just remember that this, being a rather solvent heavy dissolved plastic, will have considerable shrinkage. You will need to overfill and then sand down. The high solvent content is also what causes the bubbling. Just like the old tube glue; if the temerature is high enough to rise the vapor pressure of the solvent enough so it can "crack open" the internal strength of the still liquid putty, a bubble will form.

Hi Mike A sidenote: Please don't write whole sentences in ALL CAPS, even if they form the essence of the post. It's hard on the eyes, the on-line equivalent of SHOUTING, and generally considered bad nettiquette.

Adding the weight aft would in fact have adverse effects on stability. Tail heavy is much worse in that aspect than nose heavy. Beyond some point of tail heavy, an aircraft becomes uncontrollable. Too nose heavy OTOH makes it impossible to trim for lowest speeds, but remains manageable.

If the windows are spherically curved there is no way around forming the plastic on a master. For a one-off you can go the easy route of "crash-forming", i.e. pulling the plasticised sheet over a master that is mounted on a stand, thus allowing to pull the sheet material well below the lowest portion of the master.

No. That's the beauty of the reactive systems. No solvents to evaporate and leave a void.

Thinned putty will definitely shrink more. It's the dry content that gives the final volume.

Yep. Those are "behind glass" paints. They dry up matt and rough, but have good "bite" on the difficult to paint Polycarbonate.

It should be more than a touch of midnight blue, as this is much darker than ultramarine.

The effect is called iridescence; you can find special iridescent paints an varnishes that duplicate it (AFAIK Alclad produces tinted varnishes intended to duplicate the effect of coated optics.) Mixing varnishes with liquids that create iridescence when poured on water or blowing bubbles will NOT work. Mixing an acrylic iridescent medium such as this with an acrylic clear or future may do the trick. PS: would you mind resizing the humongous images that come out of your camera before posting them? It's really annoying to wait for them loading looking at a probe.

I wouldn't put that much trust in a zip-lock bag. They are far from hermetically tight. If your storage is subject to extreme humidity I'd take additional measures.

What I do like about this technique: It gives shade in the depth of the panel lines, but lets the color coat partly cover it. Adds depth in other words, much like the real thing. I like this much better than the common tell tale model look with wide areas of different color around the seams. This happens in real life after some repaint works, but hardly ever do you see a real airplane with wide discolorations along all panel lines. I think you are probably safe with the sharpie ink washed off the panels themselves, leaving the color only down in the recesses. Still, it's probably prudent to u

Another advantage of the contra-rotating props: the propwash has some spin to it, as air is not only accelerated backward, but to some degree also tangentially. The energy in this spin is lost to propulsion. You can regain some of that energy by taking the spin out with the counterrotating prop. Kind of like the static blades in a turbine, which first give the airflow a spin so it comes out the other end of the turbine with as little spin as possible.

I'd say mixing lacquer (which Alclad is, AFAIK) and Enamel it's worth a try. Their solvents are both unpolar, which should make them mixable.Mixing water based / soluble paints (polar) with oil/solvent based ones (unpolar) is probably a bad idea. The media don't mix.

Fuel is yellow, oil is brown, oxygen is blue. This is valid AFAIK for both lines and bezels.