Some progress on the Minardi. All CF decal are applied on front and rear wing. Clearcoating and polishing is done on front wing. This time I used Tamiya polishing compound and modeling fax after micro-mesh polishing. Result is pretty good. Rear wing is more difficult to polish because I didn't separate the wing end plate from lower wing element. big mistake.. so I will clear coat it again and only polish the outer end plate surface. The mirros are CF-ed as well. At the time I am writing this blog, rear wing and mirrors are just clearcoated and being baked in the dehydrator.

I bought a Gunze leveling thinner as suggested by Master Johnson and it works much much better than regular Gunze lacquar thinner.

Guess what I bought again. I bought this 97 Schumy flat back helmet. This one has a flat back aero shape. In fact, Schumy only worn this in pre-season testing and switched back to regular round shape helmet in most of the 97 season. I put this 1:1 helmet along with the 1:8 Minichamps 96 version and they look very cool. This flatback aero helmet is my favorite helmet.

Enjoys,

Made some progress on Minardi M193. I put CF decal on the front wing with Modelers D923 CF decal. It took me 6 hours to finish them all. Modelers CF decal is good. It reacts very well with Gunze decal softener. The toughest part was to decal front wing end plate.. I need to use 4 pieces to cover the whole end plate. I will move on to work on rear wing. After that, I will gloss coat both front and rear wing..

Finally got some spare time to work on my Minardi. In past few months, I put on 2 coats of clear on the car and got them polished last night. This time I used something new, it is Gunze CL184 super clear II lacquar clear. This one is recommended by Master Johnson Tang. It turns out the result is pretty good. I still couldn't achieve the mirror like finish, but I am happy with it so far. As for polishing, I still used my favorite micro-mesh polishing cloth.. all the way from 3200 grits to 12000 grits. Then I used Tamiya compound 'Fine' and 'Finish' to polish the whole body and finally Tamiya modeling wax. The challenge I had was that I couldn't get a dust free environment (as before). Some black particle kepts sticking on the the clear.. This is especially visible on white paint base.. In some area, I polished it too hard and the white started to appear in different tone (maybe paint in one area is thinner than the other.. ) but I will just live with that..

1) Clear coat that I used.


2) Body with clear coat polished.


3) Another view


I will start to work on the front and rear wing as well as cockpit in coming weeks.

I just came back from Silicon Valley Scale Modeler IPMS Kickoff Classics model contest at Santa Clara convention center. I took my F310B that I built 4 yrs ago there. I am very lucky to win the Best of Show in this biggest Northern California model contest. I am so surprised with this award as there were tons of nicely built military models. I'd like to thank all the modelers who put this nice show together.

Now I hope I will be able to finish my Minardi in time and take it to IPMS National in Southern California this year.