Sopwith Dolphin - more paint being splashed about

Pope surrenders to half-built model aeroplane

More progress on the paintwork. The picture shows the first coat of battleship grey on the plywood and aluminium panels. It's been quite a job to get this far, though. I've spent most of the day applying various types of masking. I suppose it's a bit easy to criticise a design 94 years after the event, but the Dolphin did seem to have rather a lot of apertures of one sort or another.

Anyway, before getting that far, I decided to put into action my rescue plan on the lower surfaces. So to start with I sanded down the wings and control surfaces. In the process, as predicted, I hamfistedly removed the rib detail on one of the wings, despite repeatedly checking progress with a magnifying glass. Never mind. All I had to do was mask off the ribs and redo them. This time I used the same custard colour I had already used on the wings, rather than the reddish wood colour I had used before; I was only going to do one more coat, and I didn't want these new ribs standing out too much. So finally I mixed a much lighter Clear Doped Linen and sprayed it on, and the result is superb, almost as good as a modern kit in my opinion. I forgot to take photos, though.

When the lower surfaces had dried, I had the job of masking to do: and that's a tedious job at the best of times, even if you're not dealing with a Dolphin with all its apertures. I used Tamiya masking tape where possible. For the circular apertures I used blobs of Maskol. For the cockpit, gun openings and the larger opening in the cowling, I stuffed in some torn-up kitchen roll and sealed the edges with Maskol. Masking solution is a bit difficult to use with any precision, though. After it dries, you can push back any overspill with a knife and this works quite well; but I know that when I take all the masking out I will have some tidying up and retouching to do. Again, this is no reflection on the Sopwith designers, who had other things to think about than the convenience of model makers living 94 years later who just can't be content with a blob of black paint to represent a cartridge ejection port.

Here's what it looked like before the first coat of paint:

So the last job of the day was to do the first coat of paint. But in retrospect, I'm not sure it's such a good idea to do this job after a day's work. If it turns out well, it's a good end to the day and you can open a bottle of wine with the feeling that it's been well earned. But there's always a danger of getting a bit reckless and making mistakes. So it turned out in this case. I was much too heavy-handed with the airbrush and am ashamed to admit that I got something very close to a paint run in one place. Also, never mind how much I prepare the surface, I'm still getting far too much dust on it.

This isn't a complete disaster, as I've now realised. I'll just have to eliminate the imperfections with 1200 wet and dry and then do another coat; but before going near the airbrush again I'll have to try to solve the problems I've been having. Of these, It's the dust that worries me most. I can improve on the airbrush technique, but the dust seems to come out of nowhere. I think the problem is that I'm using the utility room for my airbrushing, so it's sharing the space with the laundry and also some garden tools, and there's bound to be bits floating around in the air. So the next job is to clear it out, dust it down and give it a thorough vacuuming.

So all in all it's one of those days where you make some progress but you don't really feel much cause for celebration. Won't stop me having a few glasses of Chablis, though.