SPA Modeler

Somebody said Heavy Metal...

Cool! Edit: link fixed and working!!!

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... must... try... again.... arghhhhh.....!



... and he succeeds!

Apparently YouTube had a crash earlier.... must have been when it posted earlier...

Whoa! Youtube crash! No worries. "Heavy Metal" is such a great magazine, and the film rocks almost as much as "Wizards" does. I am excited to at least have a direction to take with the finish. When I was reading about surface preparation, I knew that the Squadron Green fill from the previous owner would have to be channeled then filled with superglue. I ordered some fancy superglue to follow this idea... and some tiny dropper style applicator tubes... and some de-bonder, but basically I would need to create a shiny hardened surface instead of the pebbly porous one left from the Squadron Green putty. I also realized that I could buy a new aircraft kit for about 30 bucks so if I screw everything up with the foil I can retreat to the comfort of a new fuselage shell prepped by me to the best of my abilities and sally forth using the shiny black primer followed by Allclad approach which I still need to learn.



However, I like the fact that if I make the tinfoil work (with Microscale adhesive doing the bonding duties) I can then spray silver on the wing sections just like on the real aircraft, so there would be bare metal surfaces and painted surfaces together.

I like where you thinking is heading.

Regards,

Thanks so much for your responses, Carlos and Kent! Sincerely! You’re both aces. After a bit of a break or break up with this build over the base, the project moves again. Make no mistake, Kent, without a physical copy of the Tamiya base you provided, I was stuck trying to figure out thickness and balance issues. What struck me hardest was how efficiently light the Tamiya design is; something that initially I thought I would have to add would be weight, but this was not true at all!

Naoki Kobayashi, “Zoukei Mura SWS P-51D CONCEPT NOTE #4”



With natural metal finish, I am going to once again follow in the footsteps of the Zoukei Mura modeler who built a foil clad version of their kit. His work is outstanding and there is much here for me to learn about surface prep as well as scribing/punching rivets. Mainly I think the airecraft at this scale benefits by the approach.

Bob Bradford, “Applying a Natural Metal Finish Using Aluminum Foil,” October 17, 2014

I am also referencing a 2014 lecture which features foil cladding using Soviet aircraft specifically Albanian based MiG fighters as subject. What I admire about the approach vector of this modeler as well as the ZM fella is their insistence that the foil must be laid out in a sectional approach closely replicating the actual aircraft assembly.

More details will follow, including edits to this reply to include the names of these NMF modelers.

Wow, this is going to be real interesting to watch. Nice!