Painting Preferences
 

I was sitting here sanding and trying to think of an excuse to stop and this question popped into my head. This refers to any body tube and nosecone combination where the cone is permanently attached such as pods on a Centuri Taurus or Orion. I don't reckon there's a poll feature enabled here so I'll just ask straight up.

Do you prefer to glue nosecones in tubes and finish the whole thing as one unit, then mask and paint, or do you finish and paint the tube and nosecone separately then glue nosecones in?

The easy way is to paint them separately, but it leaves a big seam. The harder way is to finish together, then mask and paint. This eliminates the big seam and makes the pod look like a one-piece spun aluminum or composite tank.

I've done it both ways in the past, so I was just wondering if you guys deem it worthy of the extra effort to eliminate the seam. Ok....In reality, I was just procrastinating on this dadgum sanding. :rolleyes:

If they're the same color I fill the seam.
If they're are different colors I do the separately.

That's generally how I do it once I finally get around to sanding. :eek:

+1 to what tonypv stated

Regardless of number of colors, I prefer to glue, fill seam/sand, then paint. Only exception would be a case such as the Orion, where the masking is not very easy. Trying to spray the cones red after they're bonded to the pods (and pods, presumably to main tube) wouldn't leave enough room to spray the inside, and the yellow bands around the pods go just beyond the support brace, so masking for that is a paint as well. I painted pod tubes offline, as well as cones, then bonded cones to pod tubes, pod tubes to supports, then supports to the main tube.

I'm glad you mentioned the yellow bands. I just now looked at the SEMROC Orion decal sheet. I assumed they were decals, but it looks like I'll need to mask and paint them if I decide that I want them on my model.

If you do go that route, consider painting the bads before bonding the tubes to the braces. The brace is not quite full length of the pod tube. That forces you to choose to either mask the brace but only part of the tube alongside it, or mask for bands just spanning the portion of the tubes beyond the ends of the braces, which looks a bit too thin for my taste. I wound up cheating on my first one and used pinstriping, but built a second "do-over" model that looked a lot better, mainly through learning from the mistakes of my first one.

I noticed the brace length after thinking about the yellow bands. I've been pondering whether to shorten the whole brace an 1/8" or at least increase the angle so that the edge attaching to the pod is shorter. I'm not sold on the idea yet.

I could also print up a yellow decal that is notched for the braces. Matching the paint would be a pain, though.

I would go with what Tony says... When I built my Centuri Orion I realized that I was going to do a lot of masking before painting the pod's NCs... I am presently working on a different decal theme that would not require painting the NCs a different colors... or you can go with the original paint theme in which I think they were white.

As for the yellow bands I would go with decals... If you are only going for stripes or simple shapes then I would spray paint over a decal sheet, let it dry for a few hours, then with a sharp hobby knife cut the painted decal sheet into whatever shape you want. I have done this with great success on the cockpit of my Wolvering, the red and white wing tips and BT tip of my Mach 10, and the purple stripes of my EAC Viper. Light coats of paint work best. It makes for thicker "decals" but the problem of matching colors is solved.

That is a great tip. It's one way to handle "spot color". :D

Greg