Bare metal foil

Easy, you just don't lead them so much - was my first thought... But seriously - you definitely need some practice, so try on scrap first. Cut a piece bigger than the area you want to cover and start in the middle. With a piece of tissue rub the foil down in gentle circling motion. Conceal the edges of the area you're covering in corners or panel lines. You can use a toothpick to get the foil down panel lines or other small details - do it gently and the foil will stretch and allow you to go around uneven surfaces and details.

Hope it helps - welcome to the forums and good luck with your projects, have a nice day

Paweł

and make sure you cut it with a fresh SHARP blade. i burnish it down with a cotton bud , not a soft johnsons baby one but a harder tamiya one, and form it round details with a blunt smooth piece of wood if needed.

Very carefully!  Seriously, the larger the area you are trying to cover, the harder. For cars, when you are doing just trim strips it is not bad. Covering a whole airplane is daunting!  The secret is to cover small areas at a time. In airplane kits you have panel lines- do each panel seperately.  The thing about Bare Metal Foil that is good is that it is so thin that edges do not show that much- you can overlap edges and it will not be that visible.  So for compound curves, do it in smaller pieces and burnish down hard.

Just google "bare metal foil"  the stuff i use is from bare metal foil co.....or you can use normal kitchen foil and a suitable adhesive such as,microscale foil adhesive.

The Bare Metal Foil sold under that brand name is much thinner than regular household aluminum foil.  There may be times when you want a thicker foil, but when you need the thin stuff normal household/kitchen foil usually doesn't do well.

That being said, I should also have said in my above tips that for doing a whole airplane I much prefer to use Alclad rather than foil.

Buy the cheap and nasty foil, Don  the stuff i get from asda is thinner than bmf and cheap as chips, thats why i use bmf for awkward bits as its more resilliant to tearing but more expensive.

Bare Metal Foil costs around $14/sq ft. A roll of “Super Aluminum Foil” from Dollar Tree, et al., a bottle of Micro Metal Foil Adhesive, plus a soft brush comes to under $1/sq ft.

Helpful hint: If you want to keep the variation of metal, avoid over-buffing! (I had to re-do one of the trim tabs on my NMF P-38J after over-polishing the different foils I’d carefully selected.)

I did a Tamiya P-51 with aluminum BMF and was really pleased with how it turned out.  I did each panel with a separate piece and the nice thing is that if you rotate the foil you get a slightly different sheen.  To put it on I just cut a piece slightly larger than the panel and then used a sanded down toothpick to burnish it.  I sanded the toothpick into a rounded over nub at the widest point and was very careful to ensure I didn't have any sharp edges that might catch.  I use that same toothpick whenever I use BMF.  Once the piece is burnished down, use the pointy end of the toothpick to push it into the panel lines at the edges and then trim off the excess by running an x-acto down the panel lines.  The carefully pull off the excess with some tweezers.  It's tedious, but if you're careful the results can be pretty awesome.

Groot