Plans fail: Repainting the body

Well, my plans for painting the body – so far, the monocoque (part RE3) and the doors – have failed. I have in fact unpublished the plans as they are dud, and I wouldn’t want anyone following me down that particular garden path. The broad idea was:

1. To paint the interior black (acrylic), then mask and paint the exterior in lacquers. Long story, but intended to avoid masking over decals on the exterior. Didn’t work as the Zero Paints were really chalky and cracked at thr masked edges.
2. To paint the green first and then white+fluro orange. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but the white and orange built up a heavy edge, which then cracked. The Zero fluro orange in particular is very chalky and fragile, and really thin – it needed many many coats to build up the colour, which made the edges worse.

So the body and doors will be off to the sin bin, to be scrubbed with solvents and stripped of paint. A total pain and it also strips off the (lacquer) putty I used to get a good surface finish. That all will have to be redone.

My new plan (ha!) for the body will be something like this:

• I want to check the gaps again on the doors and body… and in fact I will check the fit of all the body parts again, and probably paint them all together, as much as I can. This means it might be a loooong time until I can show you a completed body, and in fact start putting parts on it! I’ll try to post sub-assemblies along the way, including the engine which I will do in parallel.
• I am ditching the Zero Paints, and switching to a different paint brand – I choose Tamiya spray paints (which are lacquers) are available in Park Green and Fluro Orange. I’ll likely decant them and use my airbrush. I’ll stick with the Mr Color black, silver and clear.
• I am going to a more normal paint order – light colours first, and lacquers first. So something like grey primer, white primer, fluro orange, green, black, silver, clearcoat on the exterior and then black acrylic on the interior. I will just have to mask the exterior super carefully and/or do the interior in sections, or something. At least the acrylic can be cleaned off the lacquer if I get overspray.

So, all this is a bit of a bummer, but I think its for the best after trying endlessly to get a good finishon the body.