Waiting for painting opportunities is maddening. Dunno what I'm going to do over the winter. In the meantime, I have to get everything masked.
Here's a sight I hoped not to see:
I painted the transition and then masked it, hoping to leave it that way until the rocket was finished. Unfortunately, I forgot to sand the primer on the BT before doing this, so the process of sanding the BT frayed the edges of the masking tape on the transition. So I needed to rip it off and redo it, a bit more challenging with the fins in place. Nonetheless I got it done without too much fuss:
Finally, I needed to mask the forward transition. This one was tough, and I realized that not painting the whole thing green (including the fins) was a big mistake (sorry Tim, I should have listened). I did my best with the masking, but I am prepared for results to be less-than great (although I won't find out until the very very end, because that masking is staying on now until the lettering and striping is *finished*.) In fact, I am prepared, in the case of really bad results, to completely rebuild the forward transition/payload assembly, and do it *right*.
Truth be told, I am already feeling a strong urge to build this whole rocket again, correcting all the mistakes I made this time. But I should finish this build first.
So here's my masked-up forward transition (still need a quick wrap of blue tape around the shoulder to completely cover it up).
And now I wait for painting opportunities.
This thread is about to get really slow for a while.
By the way, I'm really digging these papered fins. They look and feel nice, and incredibly strong. I had thought about trying to do through-the-wall fins here, which would have been very tricky given the design, but I now can see it was totally unnecessary. I can't imagine anything happening to these fins, short of getting run over by a car.