Today is 1 week since the last coat of white, and I had opportunity and beautiful painting weather so time for blue. The white paint still has a faint smell but screw that.
Masked the lower half of the rocket with blue tape and a plastic bag, with a single stripe of Tamiya 10mm tape covering the actual edge of the white/blue. Here it is on my painting stand (which is working out nicely), ready to go:
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The paint for today is Rustoleum Cobalt Blue Metallic. Hcmbanjo said on his blog that the Rusto metallics take two light coats. I tried to apply the learnings from my previous failed white coats: in addition to perfect painting weather (75 degrees, 45% humidity), I did nice steady left-to-right passes, each pass followed by a 1/8 turn of the rocket (approximately), 2 coats 10 minutes apart. I think my coats were a bit on the heavy side of "light", but it looked OK as it was going on.
After reading quite a few opinions about when to remove masking tape and being unable to discern a consensus, I had to just try something and see how it works. So I removed just the Tamiya tape about 10 minutes after the second coat, while the paint was apparently still gummy. This did not result in a perfect edge, although I'm not super concerned because a decal will go there. Next time, though, I will definitely let the paint set more before removing. Nothing got under the tape; any problems were cause by the removal process. No biggie.
Several hours later the paint was handlable, so I removed the rest of the masking and the bag and had a look. And here is the most confounding thing I've encountered so far:
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It is so freakin' perfect that I am sure some new calamity must be waiting to unleash its misery upon me at any moment. i thought while painting that it was going well, but I didn't expect this. So maybe I am learning. In any case, thumbs up to the Rustoleum metallic. It is beautiful. If I did lay it on a bit heavy, it sure doesn't seem to have adversely affected my results.
I haven't decided if I'm going to try to do anything about the slight paint ridge at the mask line. I am afraid of touching the blue and messing it up.
The end is now in sight: decals, a full coat of Future and I suppose I should glue in the engine mount at some point...
Man that metallic blue is gorgeous.