Advice on bare metal painting...

My favorite natural metal finish is the Model Master Buffing formula Aluminum finish. This will give you a polished aluminum surface.

Some prefer the Alclad brand, but I find the Metalizer product to be less fussy, easier to apply, easy to find locally and more economical.

Granted, Alclad offers a wide variety of colors and finishes.

The proper order is to paint your colored areas first, mask, then apply the Metalizer.

Mike,how do you use your metalizer?I shot some awhile back and hated it.Had to put a bunch of it on and when I tried buffing it rubbed quite a bit off.And yes it was the buffing kind.Have some alclad but after my experiance with the MM metalizer I had been kinda chicken to use it

Doug,

I've used Model Master Metalizer and found that even when I applied the sealer I still had problems with paint lifting when masking and spraying a color over it.

More recently I build a P-51D in NMF (Aclad II - great stuff) and color over that. The sequence I used was;

1) Base coat of Alclad gloss black primer

2) Alclad polished aluminum.

3) Model Master RAF dark green.

Here's a photo of the result.

Hope this helps.

A couple of other details..  I agree spray you colors first BUT  1)  Polish the aircraft FIRST.  Wet sanding to at least 6000 MicroMesh or equivalent followed by a good cleaning with a soft lint free cloth and denatured alcohol.  2)  When you spray your colors it's important that you mask the aluminum areas so that absolutely no overspray from the colors ends up on the aluminum areas.  3)  I've been blending my Metallizer paints with clear gloss lacquer.  Mix the clear gloss to airbrushing consistency and then mix with metallizer about 70% clear to 30% metallizer.  This bonds it better to the surface and also allows you to overspray with clear without any changes in the surface reflectance.

Two golden rules with using Metalizer:

1. Surface prep is EVERYTHING. As dcaponell mentions, a polished, scratch and oil free surface is paramount to getting a good finish. Best results will be with the products sprayed over bare plastic, with no primer coat at all.

2. You CANNOT mask over metalizer, sealed or not. All color portions MUST be painted and masked off first before shooting Metalizer.

Thick or multiple coats should not be necessary or desirable. As long as you take care of the first two golden rules, a single coat should do the trick. In the case of the buffing formula, wait about 30 minutes to an hour, then buff with a very soft, lint free cloth such as an old T-shirt and/or fine facial tissue.

Although I utilize airbrushes for most of my mechanical models, I actually prefer the aerosol can for Metalizer.

I did my Tamiya P-47 with Alclad II then masked the Alclad and shot acrylics for the various colors.  I thought it was pretty easy actually.  Sort of surprised me.  I was expecting a lot worse!  In fact, i loved the acyrlic Tamiya red over the Alclad.  Really made the color pop.

Granted i'm no expert whatsoever, just had good luck with Alclad.

and for whatever reason my image did not post!

Using a reflective silver for a "primer" will make most colors leap off. I often use Tamiya AS-12 Aircraft Silver as a primer coat on aircraft.

How were you posting your image? This forum doesn't allow direct uploading from your own computer, you have to use an image hosting site such as Photobucket or Flickr.

i pasted a flickr.com image page using the "insert media" button.

Here, I'll try again:

major fail.

sorry for the imageless posts.

Right-click on the photo you want to post, then open the "Properties".. Copy the URL address, then click on the film strip Icon above the reply window.  Paste the URL into the "Insert Media" box...

I use Photobucket (which makes it easy), and have opened a Flickr account to see how that works (which makes it harder!). I just mentioned Flickr as another popular hosting site. After playing with it, I wonder why it's so popular!

You have to click on the image you want to upload, then click on "all sizes" to access the code that Flickr lets you use. You're supposed to use the first code < a href=  etc.> and cut and paste it into the forum like this:

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/48467027@N08/4436053564/" title="4TE7BNKDWH8C_jpg-80x80 by BGrigg, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2717/4436053564_44bbe02571_o.jpg" width="79" height="74" alt="4TE7BNKDWH8C_jpg-80x80" /></a>

Which of course fails!

There is also a URL code, that you aren't supposed to use (!), which looks identical to the URL code from PB that works when using the insert media button:

I'm breaking the rules, but since I opened up a Flickr account solely to try and help you, I don't care!

If I use the URL code with the HTML tags [ img ] & [ /img ] on either end (and without spaces) it should also work, and perhaps not get you banned! The full code would look like this. Remove ALL spaces to get the image to appear.

[ img ] http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2717/4436053564_44bbe02571_o.jpg [ /img ]

It works! Don't know if I'm going to get "in trouble" or not!

Gee, I just went and read Flickr's Terms of use:

Don’t use your account to host web graphics like logos and banners.
Your account will be terminated if we find you using it to host graphic elements of web page designs, icons, smilies, buddy icons, forum avatars, badges, and other non-photographic elements on external web sites.

So, in the future I will NO LONGER recommend Flickr to people who want to actually post images!

I've posted from Flickr on other forums without trouble.  I took the dang photo so i'm gonna post it.

Oh and now it bloody works.  This time i right-clicked the Flickr photo size i wanted and copied the location.  Then applied Width and Height settings that allow room.  So... here is my P-47... finally!

Wow,  so much good info.

I had no idea that I would get so much so quickly, really makes you want to use the forum more.

Well, as my previous research showed, there is seldom one answer.

It seems that you all agree that most of the time it is best to paint the colour areas and the metal areas separately, with no overlap.  I have also learned the importance of cleaning your model before painting, nice to have it reinforced.

I have used the Model Master Non-Buffing Metalizer but I did not like the finish.  I will try the Aluminum.  Normally, I build period versions of aircraft, but this project is meant to represent restored warbirds so I want a more polished look.

Has anyone used the colours I mentioned, all Model Master but not metalizers?

Thanks to everyone for your input.  I hope to share my results at some point in the future.

Doug