Pete J.

Less that $3 shipping for 10 8"X11" Sheets? A little over $17 06 $1.70 a sheet total. Micro-Mark would charge you $17 for 5 sheets. Ok, but it would cost more than that in gas to drive to the hobby shop. I guess outrageous is subjective.

Good Stuff. Great prices. Very thin. http://www.texascraft.com/hps/Inkjet-Waterslide-Decal-Paper/

I have to say, I appreciate his sentiment but abhor his attitude!

What he said!

Ok, I have been modeling since last month and making some decent progress. Most of us think of a mill and lathe as something to make parts for our models. However, lately, I have found myself making a lot of tools to make things. In this case, I needed a round screen to fit over the oil cooler. I tried cutting it free hand but it just didn't come out symmetric which really stood out. I have a set of punch and dies but it didn't include one large enough, so I decided to make my own. After three tries I got one that worked well.

I guess I am assuming that you are using Tamiya synthetic lacquers. If this is true, then alcohol won't be real effective in removing the paint in my experience. Brake fluid seems to work better for their rattle cans. As to sealing the tape, a very light thin coat of paint along the seam is all you need. You can use clear but I use the last coat of paint before the masking. This way the colors match and will sand down more evenly. I suggest it only as what works for you. Try both and see what happens on a spare part and what works best for you. Last, mixing up lacquers and enamels will lead to no good. You can lay enamels over lacquers but not the other way around. The hotter solvent in lacquer will wreak havoc with enamels. Personally, I very rarely mix the two on the same surface. I have had them look great when I am done and then a month later, the surface cracks or goes all alligator skin on me. Just because it looks ok at the end of painting doesn't mean it is going to stay that way. Paints cure over long periods of time and may take months to truly reach a stable point. During this time, they shrink a bit and if there is a difference in shrink rates, you can wind up with a mess.

That is a tough one. You could try sanding it down to get rid of the bleed and recoat it. unfortunately if you don't have enough paint you may not get an even coat but it is worth a try. Worst thing that can happen is it doesn't get fixed and you have to strip it and start over.

Ok, here is a very old trick. In fact it may be the oldest trick in the book. Lay down the lightest coat first. Let is dry at least a couple of days or over night in a food dehydrator. If you are going to use 3M tapes get the low tack stuff. It is thinner. Lay the tape down and use a toothpick(cocktail stick on the other side of the pond if you are so inclined) to burnish the tape down. Use a new/sharp xacto blade to cut way the part you are not going to use. Then spray it with a light coat of your base color. Some will bleed under your tape but it is the same color so that is ok. This seals the tape. Let it dry and the put your color coat over the top. Always use as light of coats as you can get away with. Two or three light coats are better than one heavy coat of the same thickness. Light coats will cure quicker than heavy coats. Oh, by the way to start over, Tamiya lacquers come off very nicely with brake fluid. Lacquer thinner will remove silver from thumbnails!

Hummm. Me thinks there is a bit of chicanery with the photo

I remember the snow plows well. The one that came by just as I finished up was bad, but the one I really hated was the one that came by while I was at work and that berm of snow had all day to refreeze into a wall of ice by the time I got home and I had to park in the street until I got my breaker bar out and broke up the ice so I could drive in. That was the worse. You guys are really making me remember why I moved to SoCal!

Mark, are you going to bring it to the meeting on the 10th. I actually plan on being there! Class doesn't start until the following Wednesday. Looking forward to it. I haven't been in a while.

Having a tough time here is SoCal too Tom! I need to finish painting the fence today. Going to be in the 70's and sunny. No lizard bites here either.

Not quite here yet, but got up this morning and all the news channels are showing the New Years celebrations starting west if the international date line, so it seemed appropriate to wish all my friends on the board a HAPPY NEW YEAR! Foster Brooks style. I hope you have a great year of builds and shows and the family is all good with it.

Spring of '68. U of W, Laramie, Wyoming. I looked out at the parking lot and all you could see were the very tops of cars and their antennas. Only time in recent history that the University closed due to weather. Of course that didn't stop some students from strapping on cross country skis and trekking down town and hauling a keg back. Town was sold out of beer by 2 o'clock. Best blizzard ever!

I live in Southern California and I own a snow shovel! Why? Because I grew up in Nebraska, spent my Air Force career in northern Michigan and Eastern Washington state. When I left Michigan, the high temperature for the month of February was 17 below zero and there was an accumulation of over 3 feet of snow. My first winter in Spokane Washington, it got so cold the buried water meters at the street froze. I learned about stuffing newspaper around the meter and setting it on fire to thaw it out and letting one of the faucets in the house run just a little to keep it from happening. I remember doing my morning run(military you know) through the street with a foot of snow to get through. I remember the anger of shoveling your driveway in the morning and coming home to a two foot tall berm of ice that the snowplow deposited when he came through. Yes, I own a snow shovel and keep it so that from time to time when I am moving stuff around in the garage, I remember why I moved to San Diego.

Dead on the mark! Every great painter I know has their own tips and tricks and things that work for them. Sanding, especially after you paint has a lot to do with touch and feel. When I am wet sanding paint, I can feel the drag in the sanding pad and tell when I have done enough for that grit. I can feel defects in paint with my finger tips better than I can see them. This is all stuff that comes from years of practice. If you are serious about getting really outstanding paint jobs, then you need three things. 1) You need a journal. Any notebook will do. EVERY TIME you paint, write down these things as a minimum: Type of paint, temperature, humidity and if you use an airbrush, pressure and how much thinner you put in the paint, and the results. If you do this every time within a short period of time you will see a pattern. You will be better able to determine what works and what doesn't. 2)Some scrap bodies to practice on. Try your skills on them and enter these things in the journal including what went right and what went wrong. Every time you do this you will learn something. Do this before you open up that $70 Tamiya kit. It will save a lot of frustration. 3)Some Castol SuperClean. This is the infamous purple pond you will hear people talking about on this site. You will need it to strip the paint off your practice bodies and occasionally your good models to start over when you have screwed thing up beyond saving. Believe me, this happens to the best of builder so there is no reason to be shy about it. Stuff happens. A fly lands on your fresh paint job. You get paint incompatibility and you get alligator skin instead of smooth paint. Paint gets too thick and you bury the detail. Painting is more about how you fix the mistakes as it is about being able to lay down a perfect paint job first time every time. Regardless, you need to have a good time learning. This is a hobby, not a life or death struggle. Enjoy it.

Micro-Mark buys their stuff from Micro-surface. Here is a better kit from them at a better price. It is better because it gives you an assortment of sanding pads and sticks instead of the cloth and sanding block. The pads work on curved surfaces better than the cloth and sanding block the other kit provides. http://micro-surface.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=272_4_75_81&products_id=76 This is the same kit before Micro-Mark puts their label on it. http://micro-surface.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=272_4_75_81&products_id=75 It is the same thing without the Micro-Mark label and you save $7 buy getting it directly from the manufacturer. I don't begrudge Micro-Mark their profit, but I don't see any reason to pay them for the convenience of dealing with them. By the way, don't confuse Micro-Mark with Micro-surface. They have no relation other than one sells product to the other. Micro-Mark is the Sears catalogue store for model supplies and I love to browse their catalogue. Micro-surface is an manufacture of industrial abrasives for a wide variety of uses. You can buy one sanding stick from them or a million feet of sandpaper. Totally different companies.

Amen! Here is the mother source of all sanding sticks. I order them 100 at a time but they will sell you just one, but shipping gets ridiculous. http://micro-surface.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=107&zenid=5d9ad1530751c2ba1bf54fd7f382407e

I agree with Bill but only to a certain extent. Just taking a piece of sand paper an roughing up the surface does not get you a good paint job but it will get you a better look than not sanding. In spite of what you eyes tell you, all models have uneven surfaces. There are very small divots and bumps that are created by the molding process. Any place on the model that has a thicker cross section will have one, because the shrink rate between thicker and thinner pieces is different. The first part of the sanding process is to get rid of the uneven bits. You do that by spraying on a very light coat of primer that is a different color than the plastic. This is called a guide coat. Then you take a sanding stick and lightly sand off the primer. This will reveal the high and low spots and you can then fill the low spots and sand down the high spots. Repeat with the guide coat and sand. Repeat until all the high and low coats are gone. Then one last coat of primer and you are ready for color. You would be surprised and how much better a paint job looks on an even surface. There is much more to it than that, but this will do for a start.

Merry Christmas to all!

Tutorial on soldering is rather basic. It would be a lot like posting a tutorial on gluing and Krow113 gave you the basics of soldering. From there it s all about the engineering of the pieces and careful cutting and fitting. If you want to get some ideas then I suggest you check out three other threads on this web site. They are: Another Super 7 by Mark Jones Adventures in soldering: Hotrod wrecker project update 7/24/13 by Randy D and if I can also suggest my own thread,Converting the Red Barron to the Black Knight Any of these shows the step by step process of assembling the different parts that come together to make interesting cars.

Ah, now I understand......a Snap kit!

Actually the main reason I use brass is because when soldered, it is very sturdy. Brass can hold more weight and does not flex under load. A good solder joint is not difficult to achieve and is far stronger than plastic will ever be and if it is wrong it is far easier to remove, clean up and redo than plastic. Also, brass machines very nicely for making delicate parts or large scale parts. Machining plastic is a real pain because if you don't get your speeds dead on, it melts into an unusable lump. And yes there is a bit of pride in working with real metal. A model built of all brass, when polished out can be just stunning.

Just goggle metal supply and you should get some local places. I have a really great place here that is called Industrial metal supply. They do everything from the little that I buy to semi loads. Neat part is they have a scrap bin that they sell out cheap. They also have a walk in for sheets of aluminum, brass, stainless, you name it. Great place to go.

The mail from Japan just arrived! For those who don't know MFH did not renew their Ferrari license. These are going to be rare kits unless that changes. I can't wait to build this and my 312.