Self inflicted wounds

Hi,

I'm working on one of those carriers now, and have been seeing nice-looking planes made by other  folks around me, so I just plowed ahead with the silly things.

My tips would include the following:

• Use a brand-new, very sharp Xacto blade for cleaning up the parts.  The clear plastic is much more brittle than civilized colored plastic, and responds better to a sharp blade.
• When painting, paint the bottom of the plae first with chromate green, and then paint over that with the color of the bottom, and when you get to the color for the upper sides, leave the canopy unpainted.  That will leave the "interior color" green as a glow from inside the canopy - not much, but some.  It
• And as far as old eyes go, some folks swear by the Optivisor head-band magnifier thingie.  I don't like hats or anything else on my head (after 24 years in the Navy?  go figure), so my solution is to have three desktop lamps, including one of the big round desk-mounted magnifier/ florescent tubes, that came from the Home Depot.  Another of the lamps is a "TrueColor" lamp from the craft store.  So my solution is light, light and more light.

Good luck to you.
Rick

I did something similar with the EA-6B Prowlers for my USS Enterprise build - a little gold- or brass-colored paint around the cockpit area before putting the gray on gave the canopies the requisite gold-toned look when viewed at certain angles.

As for assembling the little guys - use slowwwwwwww setting super glue gel, to give you some working time. And painting them is nothing ... decaling them, though, now that is a special kind of hell