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smokin phantom stains


burner12

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I was looking at the july 05 edition of fine scale modeler, and saw an article on backdating a phantom to a B model. There was a caption saying the smoke stains were airbrushed on to the underside of the elevators. When I looked at them they didn't have a hard edge, of where the stain ended, but rather a transition from stain to paint.

How would you paint that area so it does appear to transition and not end completely?

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The early Phantoms were smokaholics! You can pretty much paint the entire rear keel flat black. The only area of "transition" to worry about is on the underside of the elevators. You can airbrush the stains over the painted elevators with flat black or Metalizer "jet exhaust" if you're confident using it. Otherwise, try applying the staining with pastel chalks. You can build them up gradually and "stippling" and brush blending the edges of the stain will give you the soft edge transition you referred to. You'll have to seal the pastels with a clear flat, or risk getting a fingerprint in them later!

 

GIL :smiley16:

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When you say paint the entire keel you mean the underside of the elevators, or the metallic area surrounding the nozzles?

In my opinion, using the airbrush to paint the transition area, just paint a small line without any tape, to not make any hard edges, so it appears to transition from dark to light?

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What Gil says is correct about just some of the metal portion of the lower stabs having "soot" on them. Some guys would sand the soot off, but was way too time consuming for the couple of days you'd have semi-clean heat shields.

 

When I crewed RF-4Cs in 85/86, we were just then getting the smokeless engines, and it was done by attrition. Doing a double engine change on a Rhino is not fun, beleive me. Mine flew for around three months with one smoker and the other smokeless.

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