Quad Engine Super Caravelle ****FINISHED****

[TheChronicOne]

I've mentioned this build a few times over in the blog. No real progress has been made, however. I've simply been dealing with paint issues with the gloss black. I was getting orange peel and terrible finish so I sanded for more coats then the new coats crazed (even after waiting after the wait period directed on the can, I follow the directions because the people who wrote them know far more than I ever will) but it still crazed in a spot. I think I contaminated the surface so it was likely my fault and I am known to spray too heavy. That said, this paint is tricky and it doesn't take much for it to have a bad reaction.

Enough of that, I'm trying to fix it all. I've sanded it back down again... I made a bunch of passes and did my best to hit the tight spots which are difficult to get into sometimes but I think I did it well enough. Time for more paint! She's ready!!



BUT WAIT! After I washed it last time, I left it outside to dry then in TYPICAL FASHION, it finally rains for the second time in two months and it does so for 4 hours straight and my stupid airplane become flooded.    It's been drying again for a couple days but water is still leaking out of it which is a NO-GO situation for paint so I'm again having to wait on it. So, I found something else to work on and got the engines finishes (the putty work). They're now solid units with no weird gaps in the middle or anything. They look like they were designed this way from the get-go so I'm quite pleased with them. I even managed to fix the cowling rims a little bit. 

That's it. Next round will be to try to paint the fuselage then I will paint the engines and gear/gear doors. 

[PR19_Kit]

It'll make a nice pairing with Dizzy's 727-300. 

[TheChronicOne]

Man, that looks good!! I'm going to .... wait,..... I wasn't the only one, now was I? ... WE all need to pile on Thomas more often every time he has a notion to do something like this.    Imagine all the glorious kitbash airliners.....     :::drool::::     

I hope, and I THINK, mine will come out looking pretty sharp, too.... we'll see. They're both going to be shiny NMF birds climbing mountains in Mexico.... it's a shame we couldn't park them side by side for pictures at the end.    Or could we.......     

[Tophe]

wonderful...

[PR19_Kit]

  Imagine all the glorious kitbash airliners.....     :::drool::::     

I've been doing it for years now. 

[TheChronicOne]

Well, back to work on this one and this time the paint worked beautifully. Glorious!

Well, not quite... I skipped an entire sanding stage and have scratches I need to sand away that are telegraphing straight through the finish.         I spaced on this one... I completely intended to use my finer sand paper after using my sanding sponge but forgot. Just one of them things, I guess. I did the same thing with the engines! Paint went down great but since I forgot to finish smoothing the surface they're scratchy.

Luckily, on the fuselage, it's just in a small area. Either way, I'll need to sand things down once again and re-coat. Bonus to this is that the finish should, barring me doing something wrong, get better in theory each time I do this. In fact, this is what "they" say to do... sand and polish and do coats over and again then you get that candy showroom finish. I'm too lazy for all that and don't mind the "lesser" results however, but I can't have the scratches. I'll get those off and spray it again then we should be ready for the NMF paint.




Also have been painting the gear and doors. Some little bit left to go on those then I can clear them to seal it in then they're finished and it's just a matter of getting the paint finish right on the fuselage so I can progress.

[Tophe]

congratulations!

[zenrat]

You're getting there.  It's looking good.

[Dizzyfugu]

Go go go!  Looking forward to see the trigger for my 727 finished!

[TheChronicOne]

If I can get past this current paint situation, things should start to move more rapidly. Every time something goes afoul with the paint I lose AT LEAST 48 hours due to the wait time before I can mess with it again.

Right now, I need to sand it down and paint it again. No biggie....  I can spend an hour or two on that and get it really really smooth and if the paint goes down like it did last time it'll be in great shape. At that point I need to wait a couple days before I put the cheatline decals on then I need to gloss it. Even though it says it's OK after 48 hours, it'll probably craze again ANYWAY so I'm going to wait a further two days after that before I try it. Then, I'll need to wait another 2 days... no, probably 4.... to be safe... before I can throw the NMF paint on there. THEN, it has to dry up a couple days then I can decal it and I'll be done.       So.... if all goes well, about two weeks from now seems about right. I'm not too worried about missing the deadline but if anything goes wrong with these steps, I'll be needing the 2 weeks of wiggle room. Don't think I'll need to take advantage of an extenstion, though. Should finish on time regardless of mishaps. 

[TheChronicOne]

Last update for now! Doing a little more painting on the gear and gear doors. All I have left of those now is to paint the hubs, then clear coat it all, then finally spray the outsides of the doors silver.

Engines are still a mess with the paint. I'll be having to sand and re-paint them a couple times to get the scratches and stuff out but at least the process is underway.

The aircraft itself is "caught up." The last coat of paint is on and everything looks fine! In a few days I'll apply the cheatline transfers then clear gloss everything and pray it doesn't craze. If it doesn't, I'll simply mask over those cheatlines then spray it all NMF then we're done painting. If if DOES craze, I'll have to wait a while for it to dry then sand it down and re-paint one last time but leave the gloss coat off... won't need it at point, it's just to seal in the cheatlines so I can mask over them.

SO... good news! We're moving forward again. 

[Dizzyfugu]

Yeah! 

It'll surely be looking great! 

[zenrat]

I keep coming back to this picture...

...because with the colour and the sheen and the slot in the nose looking like a mouth it just keeps making me think of H.R.Giger's Alien.

[TheChronicOne]

Ha!!  Yeah, I see it too, now!   

That nose came from a Comet after all, so if the shoe fits....   

[TheChronicOne]

It seems I've worked past the problems with the black paint and most problems with the finish. There's a flaw left over that keeps sinking in that I'm wondering how much worse will get. I was planning to plot out the transfers to see if any would go over this area and help hide the problem but... now I can't do that. I may have to "go back" and fill this in with putty and start PSR over. Hopefully not, once I have new transfers (more on this in a moment) I'll do the same thing and see if they cover the area or not.

The main thing going on right now are the transfers. I lovingly wasted about 2 hours trimming out and measuring the cheatlines to get them to fit on this extended fuselage only for them to shatter and go bad. I didn't see this coming...  these were immaculate looking, new sheets just a few years old... not like I'm using some 40 year old Airfix sheet that sat out in a garage in the weather extremes. I can probably salvage a lot of the smaller stuff with decal fix, though!

Problem is though, I now need new transfers. Problem with THAT is I'm not trying to spend any money on this and even if I did I'd have to track down two identical sheets since this thing is longer than the original Caravelle. OK, well, why not simply grab some new ones from my own decals stash? I do have some things that MIGHT work.... but....  THE WINDOWS. The Caravelle windows are somewhat fancy being rounded triangles. Kind of a cross between an egg and a triangle, yeah? I have plenty of airliner windows decals I can use but none of like this so I'll be force to use the "square" windows and I guess alter the backstory to explain it. I'm thinking maybe Boeing license built the Caravelle in this alternate universe and maybe a cost saving mechanism was to use their "normal" windows instead of the Caravelle ones.

Seems like a decent idea I guess. I'm going to dig through my stuff and see what I can come up with. I have a sheet of Western/Brannif/Ansett transfers and of course a ton of "traditional" airliner windows so who knows what nutty stuff will come of it.