1/48 Space 1999 Eagle Transporter part 7

Tough decision – which red to paint the stripes on the passenger pod with!

Another decision – how to go about doing the masking. I used the 10mm Tamiya masking tape to do the stripes, but being ~22mm apart, that left a gap in the middle to cover with some more tape. To get the spacing right I marked up a couple of strips of tape and laid them onto the sides so that they could form guide lines.

The process of masking was simple enough, but time consuming. I used the edge of the scalpel blade to poke the tape into all the corners as I followed the contours of the pod.DSC08368 There were some tricky areas, but getting the tape nearly right, and then adding more tape to fix any gaps seemed to work rather well.

I was tempted to try some Vallejo signal red, which looked very nice in the bottle, but didn’t spray well at all. It’s in their “model air” series, but was no-where near thin enough to spray and i know Vallejo doesn’t react well with the Tamiya thinner I have. It does think fine with Future, but that’s going to be hard to spray on so that it doesn’t seep under any tape edges.

I have my usual Createx pearl red, but that’s not the right colour at all for these stripes, and certainly not the pearl finish.

So although a touch on the orange side of red, I went with Rowney scarlet. It’s pre-thinned and will dry quickly and not run if you’re careful to up the pressure and keep the flow low.DSC08369 So perhaps not “right”, but I like the end result. I carefully peeled back one stripe of masking tape to see how it had worked. You can also see here where I taped a piece of paper to the end to stop the paint spilling over.DSC08370 Wow. That really brings back the memories of the Eagle Transporter Dinky toy I had when I  young .DSC08372 I did notice some spill onto the bottom edge where the base panel joins in. DSC08373 Fortunately, because the scarlet paint is over a few good strong layers of white primer, I can just gently scrape off the unwanted scarlet paint with the edge of my scalpel blade. I noticed a couple of very tiny areas where the stripe edges were not perfect on the body of the pod and successfully used the same technique there too.DSC08374 The scarlet paint is quite delicate, so once everything was tidy I carefully laid on some coats of Future Finish to protect everything.DSC08375I really like how the panel work is showing through on the white and the red, with the subtle details from the weathering also coming through nicely. I’m really liking how this part of the kit is coming together.

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