I went back to work on the model again. This time, I brought Julia’s digital camera with me! So, the pictures look ten times better, now. It was seriously chilly in the garage this evening, so I wore sweats and a thicker sweater this time, since the draftiness coupled with the fact that I could see my breath made wearing shorts and t-shirt absolutely unbearable. Anyway, let me get on with it.
The bottom part of the saucer section, notably the Pacific Blue band that runs along the inside of the edge was finished. I had to remove the tape that I was using to guide it, because it was actually not getting the job done. So we had to finish the band freehand. Unfortunately, that also meant that the lines weren’t as tight as I wanted them to be. I considered buying an airbrush, but a gravity-loading airbrush costs in the neighborhood of 150 bucks. Well outside my price range, but then owning one would mean I don’t really need to buy another one. Just plastic loading bottles and needles, which aren’t as expensive as the brush itself. 
The top half of the saucer remained untouched, but I was able to peel back the tape on the impulse engine housing for the two small Pacific Blue stripes I painted there. The paint was actually kind of tacky, as drying in the cold made it a bit more difficult. The masking tape allowed the paint to bleed through again, making the lines uneven, so I might have to go back and repaint the housing again lightly and see if I can’t straighten them up a bit.
The engineering hull saw some progress. The top portion had the panels painted flat gull grey, as I said yesterday. Today, the panels looked like they were in need of some matte finish, because the paint was uneven when it was (finally) dry. Like I said, the cold weather is not making the paint dry quickly, leaving it mostly tacky, even when waiting overnight! That kind of sucked because when I went to paint the next section, I had to be extra careful not to make contact with my fingers unless I wanted a big fingerprint in the middle of the panels and then a gull grey fingerprint on the flat white primer. 
To the left is a shot of it if it were pieced together loosely. I’m nowhere near ready to glue them together. The stripe on the bottom half of the engineering section was uneven, due to the tape letting it bleed over, and from when I pulled the tape off, the tacky paint stuck onto it smeared! I was really disappointed by that and had to scrape off the semi-dry overage with an Xacto knife really lightly. Eventually, it looked a lot better after the light scraping.
Anyway, it’s slow going, I know, but I’m working within time constraints… just a couple of hours each day. More detail work ahead!
