Can someone give me some help on masking curved or rounded areas such as engine cowlings, jet intakes, bomb noses, and of course aircraft noses. Wahooman
Tape of any kind is tough to use on tapered curved surfaces. The trick with tape is to first define the edge with a very narrow piece of tape wrapped around the curve. You can then add progressively wider strips overlapping the previous ones until you’ve masked the area in question. The technique I like to use on pointed objects (noses, bombs, etc) is to make a paper tube that is the correct diameter at the point I want to mask and put that over the part. Usually on circular cross-section objects you can get a press fit to produce a nice clean line with no masking tape required. I hope this helps a bit.
There was a great tip in the Reader’s Tips section of an issue of FSM awhile back. It suggested using teflon tape, the kind you use for pipe threads among other things. I tried and it worked pretty good.
It has zero adhesive qualities so I used some low-tack painters tape on the back end to hold it in place. Hope this helps.
Regards,
Jeff
Invest in a few french curves (small, medium, large) and cut the curves you need into the masking tape. Lay your masking tape on the curved front end, or whatever, pencil the line you need on the tape, remove the tape, lay it flat, match a curve template to the line and cut the tape. Return custom trimmed masking tape to the model.
Thanks guys for the tips on masking curved or rounded areas. I will use your advice, but it still sounds a little hard to do. Thanks agian. Wahooman
Sounds like a good tip as PTFE tape is pretty flexible - must try this one in the future.
Cheers.
What I do is cut a thin piece of masking tape, about an 1/8-inch wide, and use that to mask the curve. Then I can use wider tape to mask off the rest…
O-Rings.
They are great for painting the bands on bombs, missiles and tanks. You can also get larger ones to do thin fuselage bands. Start with the color of the band first, apply the O-Ring then paint the finish color using the O-Ring as a mask. Example: Yellow bomb bands…paint the bomb yellow. Let dry. Roll on the O-Ring and paint the bomb its final color…OD for a US WWII bomb.
A laser level can be used to paint a line on a fuselage, just use a pencil to make marks along the laser line then mask with tape.
You can also use Parafilm, wrap the area, paint the line with the laser, mark the line with a marker then cut along the marked line.