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Nose Cone Painting


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So I've got round to painting the nose cones on my DH Mosquito Mk XVIII which have nice little white hoops around them. I tried using masking tape but it wouldn't stick to the surface due to its shape. Many fiddly attempts later, I settled to paint them on freehand which actually went a lot better than expected! Despite this, they obviously aren't perfect and it was a very time-consuming process.

Does anyone have any good tips on how to paint details like these on nose cones? Or is it a matter of sticking to trying to use masking tape?

Also, I presume that some of the more advanced kits have decals for nose cones instead? 

Thanks.

 

 

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 One way is to paint and assemble the propeller with the spinner (this is the cone bit) in position. Then use the axle of the propeller to rotate it while painting the ring. Effectively the brush stays static while the spinner moves and the paint goes on in a straight line. For a nice clean edge this can be done with a bow pen. I've had decals for spiral spinners but not for ones with rings or those that have two colours.

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Hi Captainozzy.

Ratch's method work very well but the Airfix Mossie kit has seperate propeller axils that need to be trapped between the engine halfs. The method I used was to first paint the spinner then squash some Bostik "Prestick or Blue-Tac" into the spinner together with a tooth pick or something simular. Then mount this in a cordless drill and spin slowly running a paint brush where the band is to go. just ensure the spinner spins true otherwise your band will be warped, and spin the drill slowly, I don't recomment a mains powered drill as they spin way too fast. Below are a few photos from my post of building the Airfix Mossie using this method. The original posting photos no-longer show in the post thanks to Photobucket.

Hope this helps using this method you should be able to do multi coloured spinners.Looking forward to seeing the results.

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You'll notice that the nose is quite grubby, this seemed to be quite common on the Mk XVIII as all my pictures show the Mossie looking quite grubby around the nose. Maybe something to do with low flying, the machine guns together with that big cannon.

Remember we do this for fun                                John the Pom

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Yeah John, the Molins gave off a lot of soot. There's one story of a Tsetse with a number of FBVIs being bounced by some FW190s in the Western Approaches. The resultant dogfight was well developed when the Tsetse pilot got a firing solution and fired all 5 guns.

At this point the FWs all decided to serve the Fatherland somewhere else!

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