I’m nearly finished with my Academy 1/48 F-86F-30 and I’m having buyer’s remorse over the color of the gun ports. As I’m sure many of you know, they’re supposed to be steel. I thought the Alclad II Steel would serve, but it looks ridiculously dark. I actually worked with many different types of steel over my career, and I never came across any alloy that looked like Hershey’s cocoa.
It’s not too late to change the color (although I’d prefer to overspray the existing color as opposed to stripping, this late in the game) but all I have is some MM “Steel” enamel, which I’d rather not use, since I’ll be clear coating with Mr Super Clear semigloss. Is there a way to lighten up the Alclad? If not, what can you guys recommend? I also have quite a few Tamiya acrylics I could mix, and a few other Alclad colors: stainless steel and various shades of aluminum. Thanks in advance.
Hey Binspin, I ran into the same problem with Alclad’s SS when I was building a couple of P-47s.
If you look at the airframe with the blue cowling, you can see that the SS cowl flaps are much darker than the aluminum airframe.
To tone it down, I oversprayed them with several mist coats of Alclad aluminum, until I was happy with the shade. You can see the difference in the photos below.
Maybe overspraying your gun panels with lighter aluminum colors will get you the results your looking for.
Hi, I’m building an F-86 right now and I agree, that looks way too dark. I used metallic paint from Gaahleri (Gun metal, or maybe it was steel, I’d have to look), that looks just about right for my reference photos. Like you, my first try at this area didn’t look correct, so I just tried another until I like it. I don’t see any reason you couldn’t just mask and overspray it with a different color/paint of your choice.
Not the best photo of that area, I’m away from my desk right now and that was what I have on my phone.
They are brand new, I’ve only tried the metal paints so far as they haven’t come out with a military set of colors yet. Right now they are only primary colors and metallic. For me, they are the best I’ve used straight out of the bottle through the airbrush.
I just watched Barbatos Rex’s video review. Wow. He teased that he was going to try Alclad over the gloss black primer, but I didn’t see it yet. Does it work?
I’ve never used Alclad but I did use the gloss black primer under the aluminum you see in that photo and it worked pretty well. I didn’t have to thin the primer at all, but I wouldn’t call it super glossy, it is more of a semi-gloss, though to be truthful, this is my first time ever painting a gloss primer so maybe they are all like that.
If you check out the video I referred to, he did show some samples of just the black primer on a few test subjects. They all looked very glossy to me. I’m excited to try them. I ordered the entire varnish lineup as well as the metallic kit because I build cars as well as planes, and I like the idea that they are relatively fume-free and produce a very smooth finish. I’m going to try the black primer as well, since I have a few aircraft that I want to finish in NMF, and I’m ready to move beyond Tamiya rattle cans.
