caveduck
semi old rocketeer
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2011
- Messages
- 1,827
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Buried in my box o' old built rockets I found an old Estes ALCM Cruise Missile. I originally built it in the early 1980s. Like a few others I built at the time, it fell victim to the poorly aging Testors clear gloss spray.
Situation
I've been wanting to refinish this model for at least a decade. Several years ago I did some experiments to see if the yellowed clear coat could be removed. At that time I had no way to get better decals so I worked on masking the decal areas and wet-sanding the rest. Although I succeeded in removing a fair amount of the clear coat (albeit with an insane amount of work), the project was confounded by the fact that the decal clear film itself had yellowed about as much as the spray gloss.
Here is the model as it appears now. Bear in mind that a fair amount of the worst yellow coating has already been removed.
Decals
Being able to do this project hinges on getting new decals, since the old yellowed ones have to come off along with most of the paint layer. Nowadays this isn't a problem as long as you can get decent artwork to print from. Here's where the first challenge came up.
Over on plans.rocketshoppe.com I found a scan of the correct decal sheet. But I wasn't very happy with it as the particular sheet had unusually bad color registration, and there was a lot of anti-aliasing jaggedness. The latter can happen if the original scan is done at too low resolution - for best results you need to scan at considerably higher than 300 dpi.
At first I considered cleaning up the file from rocketshoppe, though it was going to be really tedious. Then on a whim I had a look through my decal collection and found that I had an actual spare decal sheet....almost.
At some point I cannibalized 3 items from the sheet for another project. I was missing the small star-and-bar, the black oval, and one of the black stripes.
Artwork Cleanup
OK, armed with a good scan of a nearly complete decal sheet plus a marginal scan of a totally complete one, I figured I could get there. In a long Photoshop run last night I stitched together a complete set of art:
This took quite a while but I'm really happy with the file now. Here's low-res copies of the before and after images:
View attachment 56070
I'll get the full high-res version (1200 dpi, 7K x 5K pixels) up on my site later; meanwhile PM me if you'd like them.
The Plan
Simple. Print a new decal sheet, sand everything off the model, Klass Kote primer and white epoxy paint, new decals, Blair clear spray this time around. It should actually go pretty quickly.
Situation
I've been wanting to refinish this model for at least a decade. Several years ago I did some experiments to see if the yellowed clear coat could be removed. At that time I had no way to get better decals so I worked on masking the decal areas and wet-sanding the rest. Although I succeeded in removing a fair amount of the clear coat (albeit with an insane amount of work), the project was confounded by the fact that the decal clear film itself had yellowed about as much as the spray gloss.
Here is the model as it appears now. Bear in mind that a fair amount of the worst yellow coating has already been removed.
Decals
Being able to do this project hinges on getting new decals, since the old yellowed ones have to come off along with most of the paint layer. Nowadays this isn't a problem as long as you can get decent artwork to print from. Here's where the first challenge came up.
Over on plans.rocketshoppe.com I found a scan of the correct decal sheet. But I wasn't very happy with it as the particular sheet had unusually bad color registration, and there was a lot of anti-aliasing jaggedness. The latter can happen if the original scan is done at too low resolution - for best results you need to scan at considerably higher than 300 dpi.
At first I considered cleaning up the file from rocketshoppe, though it was going to be really tedious. Then on a whim I had a look through my decal collection and found that I had an actual spare decal sheet....almost.
At some point I cannibalized 3 items from the sheet for another project. I was missing the small star-and-bar, the black oval, and one of the black stripes.
Artwork Cleanup
OK, armed with a good scan of a nearly complete decal sheet plus a marginal scan of a totally complete one, I figured I could get there. In a long Photoshop run last night I stitched together a complete set of art:
- 1200 dpi scan of my sheet
- Yellowed clear zones replaced with white.
- Missing star-and-bar put in by cleaning up and cloning one of the larger ones from my scan and shrinking/rotating it to the correct size and orientation.
- Missing black oval and stripe copied in from the rocketshoppe scan and heavily cleaned up.
- All colors made uniform.
- Dust, dirt and silkscreen flaws removed.
This took quite a while but I'm really happy with the file now. Here's low-res copies of the before and after images:
View attachment 56070
I'll get the full high-res version (1200 dpi, 7K x 5K pixels) up on my site later; meanwhile PM me if you'd like them.
The Plan
Simple. Print a new decal sheet, sand everything off the model, Klass Kote primer and white epoxy paint, new decals, Blair clear spray this time around. It should actually go pretty quickly.