Madcow 4" Patriot finishing ("Paintriot")

[KenECoyote]

Hi Everyone!
I did a rush build of a Madcow 4" Patriot recently (just in time for club's pre-July 4th launch) and thought I'd document it in case anyone else finds this helpful. I've done some complex (insane?) paints and felt rushing this on the fly was right up there for me.

On the flight card I named the rocket "Madcow American Patriot".

Launched on I600 Red on July 3rd Metra NY Club launch. I loved the rocket on this motor!

 

[KenECoyote]

Love American Style

First some background. Do any of you just love a certain rocket and find yourself buying it repeatedly, but for some odd reason you've never actually built one? (Excluding hoarders who don't build anything .)

Well, the Patriot is that rocket in my case. I've LOVED the colorful design and have purchased at least a few Estes Patriots (most lp kits, but also have the rare 4-motor pro one) as well as a bunch of small fiberglass ones (Black Friday ridiculous price grab) and a 4" Madcow Patriot (this one!); however, for some strange reason I've never actually built one of these kits even though I've really wanted to...nutty.

 

[KenECoyote]

A few months ago the stars aligned and I started on the 4" one on a whim since I came upon it while searching for something else. I assembled the mmt, fins and then shelved it because...well you know...work/tv/bored/not in the mood/etc .

Then I thought why mot get it ready for the next launch around July 4th? What a fantastic (and doomed) idea!

 

[KenECoyote]

So after finding the kit again, I made the GRAVE mistake of trying to apply epoxy filets to all the fins in one or two batches...WHAT A FREAKING UGLY INCONSISTENT GLOPPY MESS! ARRRRGH!

 

[KenECoyote]

I was so annoyed and defeated that I had to walk away for a bit...do I just ditch the idea or roll up the sleeves and fix it?

Well, I figured I'd compromise and not try to do a great job fixing it... I'll prime it and see how bad it is and sand down what I can. This was probably a bad idea since filler wouldn't stick to primer that well, but the show must go on!

(Note: I'll add back in pics as I find them.)

Here's a pic after priming (after sanding the worst of it)...



Then I figured Bondo was the route to go...

 

[KenECoyote]

Upcoming - find out what I did when I couldn't find the darn "U. S. ARMY" decal...would leaving that out be noticeable ya think?

 

[KenECoyote]

As an aside, imo what makes the Patriot so appealing to me (all the colors! ) is also the reason I felt it was so difficult to paint...all the colors! That along with the roll pattern.

Of course you can always do the "easy" and get vinyl wrap for this, but I didn't have the time and I already had a lot of spray paint.

 

[KenECoyote]

So I was going to just do a rush job and ignore the spirals, but...

 

[jhill9693]

First some background. Do any of you just love a certain rocket and find yourself buying it repeatedly, but for some odd reason you've never actually built one? (Excluding hoarders who don't build anything .)

Well, the Patriot is that rocket in my case. I've LOVED the colorful design and have purchased at least a few Estes Patriots (most lp kits, but also have the rare 4-motor pro one) as well as a bunch of small fiberglass ones (Black Friday ridiculous price grab) and a 4" Madcow Patriot (this one!); however, for some strange reason I've never actually built one of these kits even though I've really wanted to...nutty.

Would you take an offer for the Pro series cluster model? I’ve been looking for one.

 

[jhill9693]

Also it’s quite stunning on the pad! Congratulations

Here’s my 3” Patriot which I finished up for the fourth. Decided to go “patriotic” and deviate from the scale look.

 

[KenECoyote]

Would you take an offer for the Pro series cluster model? I’ve been looking for one.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind but for now I'll keep my little precious... =D

 

[KenECoyote]

So, what's the hold up on painting this darn thing...let's roll!

I had lost my instructions, but Madcow still has it on their website as pdf and I didn't see any painting guide in it at all.

Luckily, I had an opened 2.6" FG Madcow Patriot (did I mention that I jad a bunch of Patriot kits? ) and that had the painting instructions. I just scaled up (single digit numbers were to represent the 4 colors needed).
NOTE: I made some adjustments to the upper section so it would result in the AV bay band being in the black section to hide it and also make the upper roll pattern of the booster section easier to paint (you'll see why later). Also note my Patriot is 1.25" longer due to the added AV band.

 

[KenECoyote]

"Do the Can, Can...can, can, can!"

So let's get them paints lined up!

As usual good practice, stay with the same brand if at all possible. I had earlier tested the primer and it was fine; however I normally use Rust-Oleum Filler Primer (requires a lot more sanding though).
Paints are lined up left to right in order of application...light to dark. Also note that red doesn't go over gray (or black) well, so plan on applying the red over (ideally) white or yellow.

 

[KenECoyote]

Prime Time!*

Shades of grayyyyyy....


*An important note here is that you may want to first apply adhesion promoter to the nose cone since it's a plastic that paint doesn't stick well to. I wasn't aware of the product at the time I primed, but would've preferred to have used it. I instead sanded the nose to roughen the surface in order to promote adhesion, but that how I did that was a mistake (more on that later...).

 

[KenECoyote]

The White stuff!

(Sorry, best shot I got was in the shade where it looks gray, but trust me it's white! )


Unfortunately as usual with spray painting, something happened. The new can of paint I used for some reason went on "wetter" than usual and this resulted in drips. . I quickly wiped the biggest drips and continued. I was extremely confused over what happened until hours later when the white paint still wasn't dried and was sticky to the touch...for some reason this batch had a mix that had a lot of something (solvent?) that delayed the drying and made the paint more runny.
Imo there are two things you can do to fix spray paint drips (aside from changing the way you're spraying or the paint of course)...you can quickly wipe it and continue spraying if it's the first coat or you can let the drips dry and sand it later (which I find to be more difficult). I chose wiping and it came out pretty good.

 

[KenECoyote]

"Then I scratched my nose..."

Remember when I mentioned how sanding the nose cone was a big mistake for me? Well, that was because I used a coarse sanding pad and was a bit too enthusiastic... causing gouges in the soft plastic!


(I seem to be using this emoji a lot...sorry!)

Now one would think "no prob... that'll sand right down!", well it was a pain to and I wasn't fully successful since the soft plastic sticking up tended to fold down and stretch rather than sand off. Oof. Still, I was able to get it to pretty presentable shape after a few rounds of filler, sanding and repainting.

 

[KenECoyote]

Let's start wrapping this up!

After the base white coat, I started masking. The Yellow on the upper portion and the red on the fin cans were easy peasy masking jobs and quite satisfying.


Reminds me of a tank shell!


("Baboon's bottom" booster? )

It's a good idea to keep the brown paper that sometimes comes crumpled in shipping boxes protect the product during shipping.

Notice the big pavers I have on my cardboard painting surface... don't take chances of a gust of wind coming by and unexpectedly blowing down everything you've just painted!

 

[KenECoyote]

Add some Awesome Sauce!

Tip (to prevent tipping!):
A jar of appropriately sized tomato sauce (or similar) is great for stabilizing a 4" diameter nose section for painting!

For the forward section, I had white down, followed by yellow, then red and finally black. Make extra sure all masked edges are burnished down well (several times) since it is MUCH easier to rub down tape than to remove errant paint!

 

[KenECoyote]

My Body Painting

Ok, let's roll! Time to do the tough stuf and mask for the famous black roll bar pattern...

However how is it done since almost ALL the freaking pictures of this rocket is from the front? Also how do I get the right dimensions?

Well, I did have those painting instructions from the smaller 2.6" Patriot; however it noted that the roll pattern is the same length all the way around and from what I understand of roll patterns, you definitely DON'T want that for a roll pattern (it's meant to show any rolling of the missile when filmed for evaluation).

So I Googled it and looked at images and I found a couple that showed the bars to be of different lengths on the bottom!

Still, I couldn't find pics of the back of the rocket, however I did come upon a picture of decals for the roll pattern on the Madcow Patriot page...


(Whoa, $25! )

I used that as a reference to measure and scale up to my 4" build.

Woo hoo things are rolling along!

 

[David Schwantz]

A trick someone told me long ago is to use a piece of masking tape to lift runs off. Just roll it over the run, sticky side against run. Most of the time it will lift right off.
Other than that your rocket is looking great

 

[KenECoyote]

My Body Measurements?

To mark out the spacing of the roll bar pattern and mark it for masking, a paper tape measure from Ikea worked great. Use the metric millimeters since it's easiest to divide the total by 4 sections. The metric circumference measure was almost perfect at ~320 mm!



You can see above that I measured the 4 centerlines and them measured a half-width to either side and then I made the parallel lines using an Estes yellow tube marking tool.

Also notice that I put a bag over the fin can and taped it off.

Note: At this point I didn't take many pics because it was 2 days until the club launch and one of those days is lost because I would be at a beach a 7 hour drive away.

 

[KenECoyote]

The bottom was trickier because of the uneven bar lengths and the bottom black band, but the top was easy since I planned it so it was just bars and no band (the black band starts right at my AV bay band).

Then I simply wrapped the middle in brown paper and tape.

 

[KenECoyote]

I see a pattern and I want to paint it blaaack...

I again burnished the taped edges really well (because black paint leaking onto white is very noticeable) and started spraying, making sure to try to aim the paint away from any taped edges whenever I could so as not to force or pool spray under the tape in case any edge lifted up.


Hmmm... something seems missing...

 

[KenECoyote]

Wife:. "What's 'u-sarmy'?"

So what to do about the lettering now that I can't find the decals and I basically have 1 day left before the launch?

Well the hoarder's mantra came to the rescue with "Boy, I'm glad I bought that on clearance even though I didn't need it at the time!"

49 cents yo!

So Hobby Lobby happened to have a clearance on a bunch of their self stick lettering and I grabbed a bunch of different sizes and colors. OF COURSE the sizes I wanted weren't available in the colors I needed, but that's an easy fix imo. I picked up 2" white when I needed black for this and also shiny chrome 3/4" for another project that I needed white.

 

[KenECoyote]

Since the colors weren't what I needed, I just spray painted them!


I then enlarged and printed out the lettering from the Madcow site decals to match the same size letters I had to get the spacing right (one of the hardest things with applying flimsy sticky noodley letters).

I applied the letters to a ruler first figuring it'd be easier to get into place and I can then transfer all at once over to the rocket. Also thia saved the painted finish (which actually was still tacky) from excessive handling.

 

[David Schwantz]

You did a good job after they curled on you.

 

[KenECoyote]

You did a good job after they curled on you.

Thanks! However that was somewhat done on purpose. The reason is that these are very thin vinyl letters and they stuck to the ruler pretty well, so pulling them off all at once with the ruler would've stretched them. Therefore I just stuck the tops, then pulled them off one at a time and let them shrink back to shape before sticking them down.

 

[KenECoyote]

Clearly I made a bad call...

So I was almost there and I now it's Friday (launch is Sunday) and I still have a bunch more things to do, however on Saturday I have to drive south to meet my daughter for a visit at the beach and then drive back (7+ hours round trip). So I was quickly running out of time and still had to finalize the redundant dd setup as well as some other things.

I still was considering whether or not to appy a clear coat (results seem 50/50 with the weird formulations I've dealt with in the past bunch of years). I eventually decided to do so in order to seal down the letters and also try to protect the white paint.

I used some fancy (you can tell by the grip!) Rusto "Advanced Formula" clear spray figuring "pricier HAS to be better, right?"...

Well I was wrong...the spray went on poorly...some spots shiny while most other spots even more dull than the paint under it!

Worse yet, the spray on the nose cone had lots of small air bubbles! WTH?!? This is something I hadn't seen in hundreds of paint jobs and it looked hideous...like Rocket Monkey Pox.

In this case I didn't think wiping would improve it, so I decided to leave it alone to dry, sand, spray, repeat. Eventually it looked "not bad".

However, for the rest of the rocket the clear coat was somewhat uneven in shine and remained tacky even on the say of launch. Handling the rocket, I got dirty greasy hand prints all over the white section.

 

[KenECoyote]

Thinking outside the box... about the box.

So there's some markings on the yellow section of the rocket..
the rectangular boxes in line with the roll pattern bars and what I'd guess to be bolt patterns above and below that are some of the ones I've seen.

I figured the yellow are looks too plain without anything, ao I wanted to at least do the rectangles, however it's kind of tricky to do a thin empty rectangle well and by now ot was ~2AM the night before our launch.

Still, I figured that I've gone too far to stop just short now.

I could use thin strips to form each of them, but it's hard and long work to place all 14 strips well and would likely have overlap or gaps. Plus I didn't have thin strips, so I'd have to manually cut them.

This is the solution I came up with. First I took the liberty of just eyeballing the look and measurements. I figured 40mm wide, with a empty space inside of 20mm would make things nice and proportional.

Then cut out the 40mm boxes and lightly scored the inside box. I didn't fully score it because then I'd have to try to get into place a flimsy thin window and that's very difficult.

 

[KenECoyote]

I found doing this appealing!

What I made were simple rectangles to put into place and then I was able to peel away the inside box (using the X-acto as needed, which wasn't much). This worked out extremely well!


I still haven't decided whether I'll add the bolt patterns or not, but at this point it was 3AM before the launch which I'd need to get up for at 7AM, so I called it a wrap!