I wonder if we could get some notes on the paint job. I was very surprised to hear the body was wood.
Well, I began by sealing the wood with Minwax polyurethane - I used the water based stuff. You brush on a coat, let it dry, and then sand it smooth... and then repeat (several times). Since the main body was pine - with really nasty grain - it took five coats to get it to a reasonable state.
I then primed it with SEM high build primer/surfacer. I didn't bother sanding it down, since the concept was that the gun would have been made out of cast metal, and the paint texture lent that slightly pebbled surface.
Some of the smaller detail parts were primed with an airbrush using Japanese Gunze Sangyo "Mr. Surfacer" lacquer primer (again without sanding).
For color, I based it all out with Krylon "Crafter's Metallic" in Charcoal. Then with an airbrush I went in with Krylon Dull Aluminum, avoiding any recesses, nooks, crannies, or crevices. I wasn't completely happy with that, so I dirtied it down with airbrushed Tamiya black and a spritzer bottle of isopropyl alcohol. Then in some areas I hit it with a thin mixture of Tamiya brown and alcohol. The "fuel cell" was done with Tamiya Titanium Gold, dirtied down with mostly brown and a bit of black.
A final step was to add the "gunk" in all the crevices with a thin wash of burnt umber and black oil paint thinned with turpenoid (applied with a fine brush).
The burnt metal/heat discoloration was done with airbrushed drawing inks - blue, purple, and brown - with a bit of Testor's Model Master "Exhaust" Buffing Metalizer.
Same with the tubes - they were tinted with blue and purple ink mixed with a bit of Future floorwax. Then at the bases of both the inner and outer tubes I hit them with a bit of the Testor's Exhaust.
The coils on the underside are aluminum armature wire, so I just dipped them in Aluminum Black and then gave them a slight buffing with steel wool.
I think that about covers it...
