Thanks for your kind comments Roger, and your enquiry FFScott which I will answer later below. Here are a couple of pics of the finished beast all but for the Rapier mount and down thrust tab and before any test glides, just in case! In the event the glides went well, straight as a die in fact, except for when it was a little too nose light and it did a flat falling leaf after the stall ooops, back up a bit. The model spans 19” and the finished weight with used Rapier, down thrust tab and 1.5g nose weight will be 34 grams. I estimate that the total of the paint finishes came to around 10 grams, pity I didn't keep a log this time.
The 3D trickery on the engines was done after studying lots of pics I found on the net and was done with various permanent markers pens once the silver was well dry. I had tried with some thinned Tamiya acrylics on a trial piece I to do the same as I had done for the cockpit but with 16 sides (I made 4 spare engines) to do I had to find a faster way of doing them and marker pens solved it for me. I tried many different markers as they dry all sorts of purples and blues until I got some good blacks that had been well used and applied them in quick strokes after lots of practice. I found you could get the first lighter grey on by wiping over the semi dry black to get grey then with a fresher pen lay on the darkest black. I just played about really until I got something that seemed to work and was quick to do. Real trial and error stuff, that’s why they all look different.
As for the silver finish, I have tried to get a good silver that I liked several times in the past but was never that all that pleased, this one is good though and I like the look of it a lot. But it has some drawbacks which I will explain, then you can decide whether you need more info. I haven’t tried it on tissue where it might behave differently but on balsa it is very bright and lightweight. However it is fragile and not at all tough, i.e. it scrapes off without too much effort as the coating itself seems to be easily damaged, even where I managed to get it on thickly. You need lots of sanding sealer (adding weight of course) to get the best finish but in my case it seems to have also caused the undercoats to crack in places possibly where it has flexed a lot. It could have been all down to my faulting application of course.
The paint is called 30-05344 Super Silver and is a Floral Spray by Oasis at about £8/£9 a large can from The Baggery
www.thebaggery.co.uk/p/branches
or maybe through you local florist. Because it is a spray can you can get blobs possibly either from lack of shaking or too cold a temp and you have to start and finish the spray run off your work if that makes sense. Probably best to spray the model in as many small parts as you can rather than risk all in a one piece model.
It was done on a conventional dope/sanding sealer finish as I was not pleased with the all acrylic systems I have tried in the past with (typically) a final coat of Halfords rattle can silver. With acrylics it didn’t help that water from the wet and dry rubbing down was retained in the balsa for a very long time which made the wings in that particular case too flexible and more fragile than they needed to be. This time with the cellulose based system all went well (except for the early cracking) but I got very bored with the continual rubbing down and more and more added weight. So will admit that I stopped before I got to the level of finish I was after when my patience ran out, it is far from perfect but looks great from a few feet away. The silver was mostly applied as only one coat as it covers well but the undercoats were skimpy towards the tail end of the model. Hope that helps.