Airfix Victor "Refurb"

[Graham T]

I built this a couple of years ago but have never been entirely satisfied with it.  I painted it in Humbrol satin white rather than gloss as I hate spraying gloss white, & it's never looked good.  With the price of the kit I thought I'd have a bash at a refurbishment, something I've never attempted before.  So after some careful removal of the undercarriage & doors, Blue Steel, the access door, airbrake petals & a couple of other small items, plus some addressing of some poor fit during the original build, it was a couple of hours with fine/very fine wet & dry to remove the decals & obtain a really smooth surface ready for a repaint.  I gave the glazing a really good polish, just hope that it hasn't collected too much crud on the inside from the sanding.  I've ordered new decals, pitot tubes & canopy masks & also a couple of cans of the new Tamiya gloss white lacquer, about which I've heard good things.  Here's hoping!!

 

 

[KingTiger435]

Good luck! Will be interested in progress.

also of course Adam Poultney has already found this thread, why am I not surprised
Considering the gloss white lacquer, guessing you are doing the same/similar white victor again?

 

Levi

[Adam Poultney]

9 minutes ago, KingTiger435 said:

also of course Adam Poultney has already found this thread, why am I not surprised

No V Force thread goes up on this forum without attracting my attention

[Graham T]

4 hours ago, KingTiger435 said:

Good luck! Will be interested in progress.

also of course Adam Poultney has already found this thread, why am I not surprised
Considering the gloss white lacquer, guessing you are doing the same/similar white victor again?

 

Levi

Yep.  I've got another in the stash & may rob the decals from that one although I have ordered an Xtradecal sheet (X72271 but I've heard that some of the details on that sheet are a wee bit spurious!)

[David H]

If you haven't given them a try yet, the Tamiya sanding sponges work great for smoothing down paint and preparing plastic. 3M Trizact is also great stuff,i f you can find it.

 

Gloss white is not the greatest at covering darker coloured surfaces unless you use a flat white primer. Something you might want to try as an experiment is to mask off around the panel lines of an area that got sanded down to bare plastic, and carefully build up the gloss white coverage again. This will help avoid piling on gloss white to areas that don't need it and it concentrates it on areas that do. Then, when that is done you can apply gloss white to the whole model to sort of unify the surface and blend everything in.

 

Mind you this is really specific to gloss white. Most other darker camouflage colours don't have similar problems with coverage, opacity, or dying time.....