Well it’s time for another update. I’m down to the painting now. This is the slow part for me.
I started by masking the S-IVB and S-IVB interstage. I’m not going to mask all the small antennas on the IU. I’ll paint them individually after the black goes on. The S-IVB interstage has a couple of sections of black/white that are divided by a horizontal line. I’m using Tamiya flexible tape for that. It can follow a gentle curve without making creases in the tape.
The F-1 engines have been painted with Tamiya Metallic Silver. The inside of the bells has not yet been worked on. You can also see that the S-II and S-IC have received their coats of white. Some of the black details on the S-II will definitely be done with decals. Trying to smoothly mask around some of those details would make me crazy.
Here you can see the S-IVB and interstage with their black paint. The Tamiya yellow tape covered the stringer sections very well. I didn’t have any seepage under the tape. The SM still needs to be foiled. I guess I’ll be doing that next. You can also see that I’ve added the silver S-IVB APS pods. To the left of the S-IVB you can see one of the fins for the S-IC. They have been painted and will be installed after the S-IC gets its black and silver details. You can also see the SM RCS quads. These are from the New Ware set. I tried to use the ones that came with the RealSpace Spacecraft update kit, but I broke off a couple of nozzles. Glenn had the pour plug attached to the quads at the nozzles which makes removing them from the pour plug challenging. Tom at New Ware attaches them to the pour plug at the quad housing instead of the nozzles. Hopefully I’ll get them off the pour plug in one piece. At least I’ll have 8 chances. New Ware included 8 and I’ll only need four. I’ve included a close up of the RCS quads. You can see that New Ware even hollowed out the nozzles a bit.
That’s it for now. More masking and painting to go. This is my least favorite part of model building. There are so many ways to mess up a model at this stage. In the end it usually ends up looking good, but it is a pain getting there.
More to come…
Luhman-ations 