So after a few days fighting with the hull joint,
airbrush and home-made
decals, we are almost there!
The joint between the two hulls took a LOT of filling and sanding to get it anything like decent. Then of course came the complexity of respraying the silver, then there was retouching the paint creep under the masking tape. The nose had to be completely repainted - there are something like 8 or 9 coats of yellow paint there!
As for the
decals - well there hangs a tail. I had bought some clear decal film for colour laser printers, but then the company I work for got taken over by a big software company whose name begins with "O" and they moved us into their offices and got rid of all out lovely colour laser printers!!! So now I have to use my own inkjet printer on the appropriate decal paper. Problem here seems to be the ink used by HP will run at the slightest touch of the liquid decal film, so today I have used up about half a sheet of decal film trying to get two "Stingray"
decals where the ink has run, smudged or simply dropped off!
Anyway perseverance paid off. However, its still not 100% complete. The fins behind the cabin should have a white "3" on them but there was no way I could print white, so I have some generic number
decals in the post that will hopefully do the trick. So here she is 98% complete...
and of course with the lights off...
and here is a close-up of the cockpit