Painting those pesky stripes on the arrestor hooks

Tools, Techniques, and Reference Materials Painting and airbrushing
1

Anyone have a good suggestion for painting the stripes on a US carrier based aircrafts’ arrestor hook? It’s 1/48 scale and the smallest tape I have is 1/8 so that would be out of scale, or uneven stripes no matter which way I do it… tried it by hand but it’s not satisfactory…

Any ideas would be appreciated…

2

I use short strips of black decal stripes rather than painting. Works well & is pretty easy to do.

Regards, Rick

3

cool, I’m hoping my LHS is open tomorrow… I know they have them there, black, red etc… next weekend the wife is out of town so trying to get everything to the final painting stage. I’ve had to lay off the airbrush last couple of days as she has been sick… don’t want to aggravate it…

I’ve seen them on so many models done so nicely… this is the first one I have done that I actually am going to stripe, others were WWII and I have found enough examples of hooks unstriped to leave them plain, but doing this one for the naval aviation build and it is VietNam era… definitely had the stripes in all the pics…

Thanks! Tom

4

Kinda like the stripes on this ejection seat (although it’s 1/32 scale)?

For the face shield pull handles I painted the whole thing yellow, then used a steel straight edge and Xacto knife to cut thin strips of tape (a little under 1/32"). Wrapped them around the face shield pull handle, and shot it black.

5

exactly… guess I will look this over and figure out which way I will go… the tape thing has some promise though. Thats what I thought about but basically was feeling kinda lazy/wasn’t thinking about it a lot… but I think that might be the way to go…

Gonna try it tomorrow and if I mess up no biggie I just repaint…

6

I concur with Music City. What I use is chart tape, available in art/craft stores, which comes in various widths and is low tack. The old adage of painting the lighter color first applies here also.
Dick McC

7

I don’t recommend tape, it will eventually lift off and it looks less realistic on the model. Try the following technique; it works great for my aircraft models, especially a recent 1/48th scale black and white F-14B arrestor hook.

First I airbrushed the arrestor hook rod overall white, following the rule of thumb, light colors first, as my arrestor hook was supposed to be black and white. The next task was to create the stripe pattern and airbrush the flat black color.

  1. Lay a 2inch long piece of 3M Blue Painters masking tape on a piece of glass. Using a straight edge and hobby knife, measure and cut the masking tape into thin stripes in the width you need for the scale your building.
  2. Next, after the white paint has fully dried, apply the thin stripes of masking tape over the white on the arrestor hook and establish the pattern. The tape masks the white creating the stripe pattern.
  3. Now, just load your airbrush with your flat black paint, and spray the next color, in my case, it was the flat black.
  4. After allowing the black to dry, I removed the masking tape stripes and bingo, I now have the black and white stipe pattern for the arrestor hook rod. To finish things off, I brush painted crome silver for the the actual “hook” that catches the arrestor line.

It sounds like a bit of work, but it produces far better, realistic results than just applying a tape. The result is a realistic, painted on appearance…like he real thing!

8

I use decal strip, beats masking anyday!

cheers

Mike

9

Greg,

I think the suggestions for using tape were the same as yours and they did not mean that they left the tape on the model. I think they meant they used it as a mask as you do.
Unless I misinterpreted what they said.

Mike

10

Thanks! for a first try at it, it went decent… a few slight abberations but I can fix those with a 3/0 brush and my magnifying visor… here it is:

I appreciate the cool tip!!!