Road-Sweeper Day Five

I did manage to get some work done today on the road-sweeper and the test cars.

Road-Sweeper

After breakfast this morning, I airbrushed the vehicle with a mix of VMA Light Rust and VMA Hull Red (roughly 3:1). I then set it aside for a few hours, to allow the paint to dry and cure. At lunchtime I dry-brushed heavily over the rust colour with VMC Natural Steel. Earlier this evening I airbrushed a protective coat of Klear over the whole vehicle. This will provide the basecoat for the "chipping".

Pics taken pre-Klear:

Rust spray:

Dry-brushed:

I was intending to use the salt method for the chipping, rather than the hairspray method, but now I'm unsure. I've decided to do a test to compare the two methods. Naturally, I don't want to do that on this model, so I've drilled out the rivets on one of the many diecasts in my collection. I also tapped the rivet posts to take 2mm screws.

The holder attached to the vehicle is one of a batch I made up the other day. I'd seen them used by someone on YouTube and realised they would be much handier than the blue-tac-on-top-of-dropper-bottle I have been using. It consists of a 20cm length of 4.5mm styrene rod glued into an electrical connector with epoxy. The blade of the connector has had its hole enlarged to take 2mm screws, then bent at an angle.

Close-up pic

I'll do the comparison test tomorrow - I don't have any hairspray, so I'll need to buy some.


Test Cars

Having let the pearlescent gold coat dry and cure overnight, I added the first transparent coats this morning. These were Brite Yellow and Caribbean Blue.

The Brite Yellow gives a very nice brass/burnished gold look.

The Caribbean Blue didn't seem to want to cover the gold very well at first. And then I noticed that I had the pressure set much higher than yesterday. D'oh! When I turned the pressure down it seemed to work much better. I'm pretty sure the blue will work better over silver than it does over gold (they didn't have the silver in stock yesterday).


As I had a bit of dead-time this morning, I decided to see what Hotwheels the Sainsburys in Tottenham had. The only problem was, that when I got there it wasn't a Sainsburys any more - it's now a DIY store. Thinking my trip had been wasted, I headed back towards the bus stop to go home. While I was waiting for the lights to change so I could cross a side road, I happened to look left and what did I see? The new Sainsburys! I popped in and had a look, found the relevant aisle and found one car that I was after. I also did some household shopping while I was there.

The "Enforcer":

That takes my count to 23 new car models; 1 left on my allowance.

"Hang on, what's that on the left of the top pic?"

Drat! You've caught me out.

Yes, another Flashfire 5 Pack. There were actually two on the shelves, but I restrained myself and just bought one. These will be kept as they are rather than used for custom paint jobs. Well, the hotrod might get used for the "wastelands" project, but the other 4 will stay as they are.

That's all for now folks!