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I hate it with a passion, I hate prep work, I hate masking, I hate painting and I hate mounting, maybe this is the wrong hobby for me. I've spent the afternoon painting my Sand Viper body, I've masked it and done a three colour paint job on it all in two and a half hours , maybe patience is my real issue, I just hate waiting for paint to dry. How do you guys who turn out such fantastic paint schemes do it, is there some form of medication you can get that relaxes you enough to enjoy the experience but not so much that you paint your own arms

FERRETTI wrote: I hate it with a passion, I hate prep work, I hate masking, I hate painting and I hate mounting, maybe this is the wrong hobby for me. I've spent the afternoon painting my Sand Viper body, I've masked it and done a three colour paint job on it all in two and a half hours , maybe patience is my real issue, I just hate waiting for paint to dry. How do you guys who turn out such fantastic paint schemes do it, is there some form of medication you can get that relaxes you enough to enjoy the experience but not so much that you paint your own arms

Nope.

I mask and prep watching TV or listening to a ball game, but it's something for me that is therapeutic and relaxing. It's one of the few times (also working on R/C cars) that I can calm down my AD/HD without any outside assistance, and allow my brain to calm down. Seriously, painting is one of the VERY few things that I can actually concentrate on without any outside distractions.

I am impatient, too, however. So one of the things I do use to hurry things along when I'm shooting a lot of different colors and blends is a Wagner heat gun to speed up the dry time. Water-based acrylic paints can be speed dried with heat, like a hairdryer. Those paints take a couple of days to dry/cure properly, but you can make the project go much faster with a heat source.



I've painted probably over 1000 bodies since I started doing this stuff, and I have screwed up plenty of them for various reasons, but mostly impatience. Just a little goes a LONG way.



doug

remember my desert gator?
I went for a simple 3color fade to minimize the time on masking: I hate that part most.

So masked the windows only, and then just before I was gonna put the first color on, I noticed some little stuff on the inside and wiped the shell out with a clean hanky.
Laid down the first color and there the streaks were: it seemed like the paint was looking for wipe traces to stick on

I couldn't care less after that and the 2 other colors went on with very little drying inbetween. It was all done, including removing the masks from the windows, in less than an hour.

The masking tape just never seems right: it peels away while you're looking at it, paint bleeds under the edges and reacts with the glue, or it leaves sticky traces after removing it for the second color, or is just uncutable so by the time you're done the shell is full of fingerprints , but you can 't wipe it without risking to spoil the mask again. Garglle.

Mr. ED wrote:The masking tape just never seems right: it peels away while you're looking at it, paint bleeds under the edges and reacts with the glue, or it leaves sticky traces after removing it for the second color, or is just uncutable so by the time you're done the shell is full of fingerprints

You need to try some high quality masking tape The cheap stuf for masking windows at home wont work on r/c bodies .... try some real automotive masking tape like 3M .... you will be suprised with the difference it makes

I used the tamiya tape at a time, but it was so narrow you used up everything in one buggy body.
when, one year later I used the little bit I had left , the glue had lost lots of it quality just from sitting in the drawer

Is Pactra still in business?
They used to have very aggressive paint which would eat itself into the lexan.
It would never chip off , no matter how little care you took of preparing. And it'd dry real fast too: so you just went very light layer, waited 2 min, next one, next one,... never any bleeding.
Excellent for the less patient among us.

(Just DO NOT EVER try to put it on a previous layer of other paint brands: learned that the hard way when I painted my first shell for someone else)