Painting 1:700 clear plastic airplanes.

I just masked the canopies for the observation planes on a 1:350 cruiser. I used Tamiya tape and it worked fine.  In fact, I found more problems gluing the planes than painting them.  The stuff felt more like acrylic than styrene, and may have had some sort of mold release.

Earl, you might want to check out Checkmateking02's posts of his tiny Hellcats from last year's US Carrier Aviatoin Group Build.

It starts here, you'll have to follow along from there.

cs.finescale.com/.../154052.aspx

CMK02's posts start a little past halfway down this page. I don't recall it taking him too long to finish them, so maybe not to many pages to forward through.

CMK02 did an outstanding job on his Hellcats, hope this might help.

Rex,

Thank you most kindly for this info. I have a lot of the F18's to paint for the USS George Washington, CVN 73 which I am now going to tackle starting with the Trumpeter USS Theodore Roosevelt CVN 71.

As this a 1:700 kit, I do not think that it will be easy for me to build this in a timely manner. My grandson is serving on the George Washington and I want to have it done when he come's home in early part of 2015. What is good for masking off such small canopy's?

Thanks Rex,

Earl

I am going to work with the idea that you have an airbrush, so if you don't, then just change this to meet your methods.

after you wash the parts, and rinse with Cold water, let the parts dry.

Mask off the canopy on each plane, then paint the plane overall in the interior color. After that dries, paint the plane in the bottom gray, let dry, then paint the plane in the top gray. If you have any trim colors, mask and spray those.

then remove the masking on the canopy, and you have the interior color showing through the clear, just as if you had painted the interior separately

if you try to do a "patchwork" of the interior color, that patchwork is what will show through the clear canopy bump, so don't shortcut that part

Rex

Soap and water to clean,  prime first with white or grey, then paint. clear  plastic for some reason seems difficult to paint, probably because it is transparent but patience ond many light coats usually do the trick.