Engine advice
I had decided to leave off the engine exhaust stubs and covers until later and this is a mistake because you can’t add these parts once the engine is encased in the frame! I got around it by cutting off the locating pins on each stub and gluing them into the cover from inside with tube cement – this allows time to position each stub correctly and align it before attaching each cover (with exhaust stubs) to the engine. The stubs had been sprayed Tamiya Red Brown (XF-64) and weathered using pencil graphite on an old cut down paint brush. Some heat staining is carefully sprayed onto the exhaust cover using Alclad Transparent Smoke – very subtle and pressure turned down to about 10psi and hardly any trigger action, enabling the smallest amount of paint to be applied and thereby retaining control.
Prep for painting
It’s going to be well worth taking time to make sure all the joins and seams are prepared to the best you can manage so that they don’t show up adversely later on when the model is complete – ‘silver’ finishes are incredibly unforgiving on the eye! The finish is going to be achieved using various tones of Alclad2 metal lacquers (paints to most of us, despite the subtle differences!).
Grey this time
The RAAF aircraft definitely seem to have a silver-painted appearance, rather than natural metal – certainly the pics I’ve found from the Net and sources mentioned at the front end of this feature suggest that. I almost always use Alclad’s own Gloss Black base or Tamiya Gloss Black acrylic paint as a start for all natural metal or shinier metallic finishes, but not this time, because I feel that the slightly dull aluminium that I need to create is easier to achieve using grey as a base.
So, I sprayed the whole airframe using Tamiya light grey and set it aside to dry thoroughly for a few hours, then buffed the surface with Micromesh polishing cloths and soft nail buffers (check out your Techniques Bank for more on using these).