Mixed Bag

Well, this blog will be warts and all, so here we go. It's been a real mixed bag this week, and something of a (I guess) more downs than ups. But we'll get to that shortly. Last time I wrote that I'd cleaned up the chassis enough to take a primer, so that's what I did:



and:



The primer is a rust killing Hammerite product. The other side is roughly the same as this...

I then painted it with a number of coats of stonechip paint, first grey:





and then black:





before the first downer set in. My plan was to spray clear Waxoyl over this stonechip paint, so that it would not really show, but there'd be this extra layer of protection. So I grabbed my shutz gun and blasted away:



The coating of Waxoyl was about 1.5mm thick, and looks like a thin layer of snotty snow. I decided to grab a brush and brush it out. The results were less than impressive:



It looked OK with the stonechip, and given there was 4 coats of it on, probably would have lasted well. Now it looks more like the colour scheme of one of the Afrika Corps panzers. this is because in some places it just won't brush out nicely, and in some places it actually does brush out to something close to clear. Obviously it's not a very uniform coat. Mightily fed up, because this is really down to me being impatient and not giving it enough thought before getting to the action. It's basically gone on too thick out of the gun. Think I needed a lower pressure on the air feed to the sprayer. Because the pressure was high, it was hard to see how thick it was going on, and hence not a very uniform result.

I'm now wondering what to do. If I now try to spread it, it looks to take all the previous paint layers with it (because they're not fully hard). If I do nothing, then it will be ages until I can do anything, and the only course of action is to get the lot off and start again. I'm not sure there's another alternative. I suppose I can accept that although it looks crap, it will be very well protected, but that's a tough one to swallow. I'm still thinking about this one. The saying that is going round and round my head is "If it looks wrong, it probably is." Bugger.

This is all annoying, but it hasn't cost me very much in terms of money. Glad I didn't start this blog as a thread on a forum. I'd be awash in keyboard warriors by now.