Painting Plastic

If anyone worked out yesterdays pile of bits was an MPC Road Runner and the Rail Rider kit, well done. Except if you cheated and looked at my Flickr page, in which case you are a bad person and are sentenced to a week at Scaleforum while wearing a "OO is good enough" t-shirt.

Anyway, I never liked the Road Runner much - I was always on the side of Wile E. Coyote. When I saw this kit in Modelzone years ago though, I knew I wanted to have a go and so in their closing down sale I picked one up, stashing it away for a rainy day.

More to the point, once I had a proper look at thing, I realised there was a problem with it. While the plastic parts may be coloured as the box says, they are the wrong colours. Snap the bits together and you'll get a model but it doesn't look much like the one in the picture.

For a start, the smokebox and stack are black, not red. Pedants might say that this is technically more accurate, but not in the world of Hanna Barbera. The pulley belt transferring drive from the V8 to the cylinders (why did the GWR not try this?) is red as is the block and that's definitely wrong. Red connecting rods complete the picture.

This caused me to leave the kit in the pile as I knew it meant spraying and I couldn't be bothered.

That is, until a spare red spray can became available after using it on my Dad's boat project. Out came the kit, main parts were assembled (with glue) and then primed in white no matter what the colour of their plastic. Red bits were Humbrol'd and black bits coated with Halfords fines satin black.

 

That's more like it. Now they just need to dry properly and we move on to final assembly.