Time to start the model! I opened the box and laid out the pieces, thinking it would be about a 2 hour project. (For those of you who have done models before, feel free to laugh). :-) The first thing I noticed was that despite the box showing a red GT, all the pieces were white! I guess I'll have to make another trip to the hobby store to pick up some paint. Trying to think ahead of what I would need, I jotted down red, silver, gold, and black paint, and a paintbrush. Then I headed back to the store.
Had I not asked for assistance, I would have been in real trouble! Thankfully, I am quite impatient, and did not want to waste another 1/2 day in the store looking for what I needed, so I asked the kind boy behind the counter where the paint was. He asked a few questions while escorting me over to the paint section and led me first to the spray paint. Apparently, it is faster and looks better to spray paint the large pieces rather than use a brush.
Then, the guy I was talking with picked up a can of clear coat and told me I might want that as well. (Well yes, of course I needed clear coat. How silly of me to forget that!) As he handed it to me, knowing full well I have never used clear coat, he gave advice on how to tape the plastic and keep the wheels off when it was time to use this. He was quickly becoming my friend. :-) He then pointed me toward the tester’s paint, and told me that the smaller pieces would need to be painted with these. I was now starting to think this would take a bit longer than 2 hours… For spray paint, I picked up red, black, and clear coat. For tester’s paint, I bought gold, blue, silver, red, and black. I dropped these on the counter (luckily the store had just opened and they were not busy yet), and I remembered about the paint brushes.
My new friend apparently did not trust that I could pick out my own brush and walked me back down the paint aisle again. I asked him if I should use a toothpick to color the more detailed areas, not knowing what needed to be painted yet, and he grabbed a pack of 3 brushes, including 2 very thin brushes that he assured me would work better than a toothpick. As he was ringing up the sale, he must have known by now that this was my first model project and asked if I had any glue. (Don’t models just snap together?) Uh… no sir, I have no glue. So he kindly threw in a small bottle of superglue and told me to use it with care… I walked back in the house 1 ½ hours and $45 later ready to finally begin the model.
Uh oh, I forgot to ask. Do I paint now or after the model is put together? Since it seems to make sense to do it now, I brought my supplies outside, along with a couple of old boxes flipped upside down and newspaper to protect the boxes. The pieces were all attached to plastic and neatly numbered. To paint them, I’d have to remove them from the plastic and hope that the pictures on the instruction sheet would be enough to figure out where they went when it was time to assemble the car. You would think that a simple twist of the piece would remove them. Not so!!! In fact, I had to find a scissors to cut many of them, and then discovered I’d also need sand paper to smooth out the areas that were attached to the plastic. Yes, that meant taking a trip to ACE Hardware (which is luckily very close to my house) and picking up sand paper.
Without a clue as to what most of the pieces were for, I tried to divide them by the color they would need to be painted. There was a pile for black, red, and silver. That’s right, silver, which meant yet another trip to the hobby store to pick up silver spray paint. (Why didn’t I think of that before?) The can said to hold it 6-10 inches away while spraying. I started with the red pieces and applied the first coat. There was some wind blowing the spray paint right back at me (there goes my shirt), but other than that, the pieces didn’t look too bad! I started to get excited. Progress!!! :-) Then I moved the box with red pieces out of the way, and noticed that the chair, sand paper, scissors, and even the white decals and other pieces (from the black and silver piles) had a find mist of red on them – this does not come out by the way. It took a lot of willpower not to scream; the box only came with one set of decals. Oh well, the red was not very noticeable, so other than ordering a new model, it would have to do…
After moving all other objects far away from the spray paint, I painted the black pieces, which soon became my favorite color! I was, however, stumped on a lot of the pieces, and went to the Ford GT Forum to look at pictures of the engine and inside of the car, trying to figure out what color the other pieces should be. Huh. Some of these pieces don’t resemble anything at this point. When all else fails, go with silver, so… I took all the little white pieces that were going to be silver, and attempted to neatly place them on the newspaper so I could paint them all at once. I should point out that trying to get the little pieces to stand upright despite the spray and wind was very challenging, and not that successful. Pieces fell over (even when I tried to punch holes in the newspaper to get them to stick) and a few even rolled onto the ground and were close to being lost forever. Note to self: Next time, wait until the smaller pieces are at least partially assembled and then spray paint… But despite all of that, the silver was finally applied and looked pretty decent (as you can see by some of the silver pieces below)!
The can did say to wait at least 3 hours before applying the second coat, so I left the red and black boxes with the pieces on top of them outside, and brought the silver pieces (which did not need a second coat) inside to dry.
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