Hey there,
the last few days, I've been working on the handle butt plate of my blaster. trying to find a good way to reproduce the scratches. I tried to transfer printer ink with acetone on metal but it didn't work. I think there might be a way to do it though. I guess someone could also print vinils decals or waterslide decals maybe. I wonder how that would look, if it would look great or if it would be too obvious.
In the end, I just went totally by hand... so here is my approach:
First, I sprayed 2 thin coats of black without primer (tamiya TS29), which was a really fragile result.
I printed the original plates to use as reference. I tried to cut the contour and try to do the scratches with that as a model, It helped a bit. by I mostly eyeballed it.
finished scratches:
What was a bit frustrating to me is that the original looks very sharp and detailled and that when I was removing the paint, it was never removing the super tiny amount of paint that I wanted to remove. for instance, I have big areas with no paint at all when on the original you can still see a little bit of grain in the most used area.
so, what I did was to spray from a long distance with gray primer, then black paint and then finally clear coat. sanded lighly (I mean lightly, with 1200grain) before and after the clear coat to remove the grain. I really prefer the result like that, it added black grain on the metal areas and gray grain on the black to make it less uniform. those 3 light spray are also reinforcing my really fragile paint and I feel that it should hold better now.
here is a small comparison with the original. Of course I'm still far from it but it looks quite ok for me already.
I'm actually quite moving forward on my blaster this days, painted the covers in black, modified and scratched the steyr ammo clip, painted the butt plate, blued the cylinder! never did that much in the last year that I had this kit
I hope you guys like it.
cheers