Pilot Boat painting disasters - Part 1

Listen to your own advice. That's what I should remember. It's good advice and I do know what I'm talking about sometimes. When I don't, it goes a bit; well, you judge...

The pilot boat top is yellow. Bright yellow with silver window frames. Pondering how to achieve a neat finish, I decided to paint the frames, let them dry, mask them and airbrush the top coat.

With brass handrails firmly attached to the superstructure, a quick spray of primer seemed in order and this went well using a can from Halfords (see, I do go in there, despite what I said yesterday). This was allowed to dry and Humbrol silver was applied with a brush. All very nice. Not too neat but that didn't matter.

Again, allowing for plenty of drying time, metallic paints are special in this respect, a hour of masking followed. I used the proper Tamya tape. The good stuff. Trimming the edges with a knife resulted in what I though was quite an impressive job. Well, I hate masking so it looked good to me.

Back at the spray booth, I started with half a bottle of Railmatch yellow. Wafting this on, I discovered it wasn't covering the excess silver poking out from the masking. I had forgotten how rubbish yellow is at covering anything.

Never mind, an extra dose of white primer and the silver vanished. Quite a healthy dose but at least I had a decent base to work on.

Spraying the yellow continued and I remembered my advice: Paint large models with an aerosol. The Badger 200 is an excellent airbrush but doesn't really put out enough paint for a big model. Although I got coverage, I could see that some areas were slightly yellower than others. Attempt to fix this with more paint didn't seem to go well. Eventually, I ran out.

Never mind, I let the model dry and took it out to the daylight. It actually looked OK.

So, back to the workbench to peel off the masking. Clever people will work out what happened next.

The depth of paint and primer applied reared it's white and yellow head. Around the windows, the surface cracked and broke away. Think potholed tarmac breaking away in the road, but in bright yellow, and you'll see what I mean.

It was no good, the paint was going to have to come off.