Painted and Trimmed

TA DA! Here it is with the paint completed at last. I trimmed the body, mounted the rear wing and sideview mirrors, and placed the body on the chassis. I have to admit that it came out looking a lot better than I envisioned.

The spray-on window tint did not quite turn out as expected. In the pictures they look like blacked out windows, and the coverage isn't as even as I'd want, but to get it that way would make it even darker. I were to do it again, I think that I would have leave the windows clear.

The progress as of the end of the last post was the painting of the trim, so I guess I should pick up at that point to catch things up.

The original concept was similar to the end product. Originally, I was thinking that the white/red transition area would be defined by two diagonal lines -- the front line running from the bottom-middle of the front door to the top middle of the roof line, and the back line running from just in front of the rear wheel at the bottom to the back of the roof line where it starts curving down. It would form a shape like the tail of an airplane. In this area, I thought about having alternating red and white bars, so it looked like the white front was interlocking with the red rear. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a pain in the rear to mask neatly.

My wife suggested that I should just tear the blue masking tape into strips, because it was much easier that way, and then I wouldn't be so worried about clean edges. I did a few experimental strips, but found they always curved one way or another, which meant the horizontal interlocking bars was out of the question. So my wife, who was on a roll at this point, suggested making it look like the car had driven through the white, and the white was tearing off of the car. Bingo! After a few minutes, I had one side masked. Looking at it, I wasn't quite satisfied, because it just looked like a big jagged zig-zag line, so I tore some smaller pieces to give the effect of tatters flying off. After a short time, I had the other side and the roof masked off as well. One other effect that I hadn't thought of but really like is the fact that the left side is not simply a mirror image of the right. They are completely different. Since the rear was going to be red, I was going to paint that first, so I went ahead and masked off the front of the shell using a couple sheets of paper rather than tape everything. That was the last task for the night.

So this morning, I happened to be looking at my motorcycle helmet, because it was comprised of the colors I was considering. This is truly a coincedence, because the only reason I went with red and white (or silver) was because I had plenty left over from painting the E-Maxx. After discussing this with my wife/graphic designer, we decided to stick with the white, because we agreed that the silver might blend too much with the silver/black snakeskin hood.

The colors that I used were Pactra's Metallic Red (RC264) and Pearl White (RC276) backed with the Fluorescent White Covercoat (RC290). The window tint spray paint is also Pactra, RC294. When I painted the E-Maxx, I used silver as a backing color so I thought this time I'd use the fluorescent white covercoat to see if there was any marked difference. Under indoor lighting, there does not seem to be a difference. If tomorrow is sunny, I'll get a better look at it outside.

Before painting, I decided to go ahead and mask off the tail lights to leave my options open should I decide to attempt to build light buckets. The other option would be to still get the LEDs, but just mount them behind the stickers, in which case having the body clear would allow those to light up even if they don't actually light up the road. I masked the tail lights using liquid mask just to see how well it works. The headlights were done with the blue tape trimmed with an x-acto.

The actual painting took the whole afternoon. Fortunately I only work half days on Fridays, or this would have leaked over into tomorrow. Painting with metallic colors is a lesson in tedium, because it's transluscent, so you have to spray in a lot of light coats. In the case of the pearl white, it's even worse, because the first coat is almost non-existent, which led to me overspraying it which resulted in some pooling. Fortunately after the 5th coat and the backing, it's not too obvious.

Between coats, I used a small fan to help the paint dry. Unfortunately, there were some areas where I got the backer coat a bit thicker than others. As a result, there were some areas with tacky paint even though the majority of the working areas were dry. I must admit that I probably rushed it a little just so I could get it finished since this whole project has been going on all week. I know, shame on me.

As I was removing the masking for the windows, I learned something else about the masking strips -- the paint does not adhere to it as well as it does to the blue masking tape. Why is this important? Remember how I said I used the strips to border the edges and the blue tape to fill in the rest? Well, this leaves a very narrow gap between the edge of the blue tape and the edge of the white strip. When I would pull up the blue tape, it would grab the paint and pull it off the white strips. Then when you pull off the white strips, the paint would slide off the tape, and you would not get an edge to the paint. Now mind you that at this point, the window masking had a few layers of black from the trim, a few layers of metallic red, a few layers of pearl white, and a few layers of fluorescent white covercoat. I ended up taking the x-acto, and using the back of the blade, I would score a line along the edge of the masking tape so that the paint would separate instead of lifting off. It took a little more time this way, but I was able to keep the paint edges neat.

In the future, I think I'll stick with the blue masking tape since it seems to work best for me. The headlights came out looking cleaner than the tail lights, and the liquid mask was a pain to remove. I have a feeling I didn't use enough of the liquid mask. At any rate, I like the results I got from the masking tape much better.

The last thing I did was spraying the window tint on everything but the windshield, but I've already covered my thoughts on the tint. The other downside of the tint is that now the inside of the body has a semi-gray sprayed look instead of the pristing white covercoat. I may mask off the top of the car and re-spray the sides if it bothers me enough.

After all the spraying was done, I trimmed the body. A lot of articles I've ready talk about using a compass knife to cut the wheel wells, but I prefer to simply take my x-acto and score a line around the entire bottom edge of the body. Then it's a simple matter of cutting a few perpendicular lines to make smaller, fairly straight pieces, then snap those pieces off. It leaves a fairly smooth edge that I've rarely had to sand down. The final touch was to mount the rear spoiler and the sideview mirrors.

The next step will be to put the stickers on the body, which means I need to decide on a graphics package. I figure that I'll go ahead and put the ones on that I know won't be covered up, such as the front grill and hood details. I'm thinking about just leaving off the head and tail light stickers for now. Even though you can see into the body, at a distance it looks like they just have the aftermarket smoked covers. I'm also planning on getting some aftermarket wheels for the ABS tires I bought off eBay, but I'm very pleased with the way that the stockers look. Options I'm considering are chrome with red spokes or just basic black. White could be pretty nice, too. Fortunately I have three sets of ABS tires, so I can try a number of looks.

One last item of note. I previously wrote about the antenna wire being too short for the antenna tube's length, resulting in only about 4" of antenna coming out the back. For now, I've decided that I'm simply going to thread the antenna through the back body post holes and run an internal antenna setup. If I notice any performance issues, I'll re-visit this.