It’s been a productive couple of days and I’ve managed to work on quite a few of the pieces.
Haven’t actually finished anything yet as I tend to go from piece to piece and back again - keep telling myself it’s more fun this way!
Starting back with the base plates I’ve added filler to where the large boss meets the disc to create a fillet.
To do this I simply pressed a piece of tubing the correct diameter into the wet filler and waited for it to dry. As I’d wrapped the tube with a piece of tape the filler didn’t stick to it and it came away easily leaving a perfect radius. It was then just a case of sanding away the excess filler and they were done.
I next glued all the washers in place and gave everything a light sand to soften all the sharp edges and to act as a key for the paint.
I normally spray everything with cellulose paint, but as this doesn’t stick to styrene very well I first gave everything a light coat of acrylic primer. I’m not actually using it as primer but as more of a key for the cellulose, which I much prefer.
Don’t get me wrong cellulose will cover styrene, but should you mask it, it generally lifts of in sheets when you remove the tape – disaster!
Once dry I spray over it with cellulose in the normal way with no problem of adhesion.
I wasn’t happy with one of the base layers, which I’d made a long time ago out of multiple pieces of Mdf.
A major problem was that I hadn’t left enough tolerance between it and the detonators resulting in it being difficult to fit them in the opening, the second was that I dropped it and it broke into a dozen pieces!!
As a result I decided to make a new one out of one piece of 25mm Mdf, and which is the way I should have made it in the first place.
This just needs the inside edges sanding and its ready for painting.
Next revisit was the detonator clamps.
I’d only ever only made one of these and it suffered from the same problem of too tight a tolerance resulting in the detonator not fitting correctly and that’s before I apply any paint.
So I altered my drawing and machined new ones from modelboard.
These were they marked up and all the angles produced on the disc sander.
I need to finish sanding these and they’ll ready for painting as well.
The hatch was beginning to look a little battered so I rubbed it down and applied a bit of filler in one or two areas.
I still have to fit a small divider into the long illuminated edge, and then I can give it a coat of primer with the rest.
Finally, I couldn’t resist putting some of the new pieces together.