Did I say I hate to shoot clear! If not, I hate to shoot clear. One of the reasons I hate clear is you can bust you butt for hours and hours cleaning up and fixing all the little stuff and the very second you shoot the first coat of clear about ten more pop up! That's what happened yesterday. I had time so I decided to shoot the fuselage. I spent about an hour cleaning and tack clothing it. Half way into the first coat of clear I found two smudges that you get mostly from tape residue. They didn't show before the clear, but they do now and of course they are at the very top of the fuselage. To be perfectly honest, no one will see them, but I will!

The other problem that showed up was a red cloud on the white. I say a cloud because that's what it looks like. Red is notorious for somehow working it's way onto white surfaces. Just handling the plane will transfer just the slightest amount of red and of course over white, it's going to show. From past experience I know red can be a big problem so I shot intercoat clear (SG100 HOK) on the red on the wings and stabs, but figured I could get away with it on the fuselage and it came back to bite me. Again it's just one small area of red that worked it's way onto the white and like I said, no one will see it except me, and I'm the only one that cares anyway, so I will fix them and start all over on the clear that oh by the way...I hate! I think I am going to start a new craze......matte finished airplanes with no clear...now that's the ticket!

The one wing and stabs that I shot are setting up nice and I will be cutting them today. Some of you older guys have likely heard the term "color sanding". Back before the 2K (base coat, clear coat) came into being, the way you produced show car finishes was to literally sand the paint flat to remove the orange peel and blems. As you would sand, you would literately see the color you were sanding floating on the surface in the water. With the base coat/clear systems "color" is the last thing you want to see. If you see color it just means you have cut past the clear into the base coat. And of course if you have graphics under the clear, you just messed them up too. When we sand clear it turns to a milky white. The term used now when working with 2K systems is "cut and buff". We are cutting the surface with sand paper and then buffing it back to a gloss. Sometimes you will hear the term color sanding on 2K, but it's not accurate.

Now after you get a good coat of clear on, most guys are going to leave it at that. The thought is "why sand and mess up a perfectly glossy finish". Trust me, the older I get the more I am starting to move to that thinking, but I know what is at the end of the road, and the effort is worth it. It is amazing the difference between a gloss coat left alone and a good cut and buff finish. To be perfectly honest, I never seem to be able to get the level of gloss back that I had before I started to cut and buff, but it's just a different level of gloss, more refined, if you will. I talked earlier in this thread about reflection and refraction (go back and find it, if you missed it). You see all gloss coats have some level of orange peel. I don't care if your 100 grand BMW was shot with a multi gazillion dollar robot, it will still have some level of orange peel. The problem is with those microscopic little bumps (orange peel), light is not reflected back to us evenly and gives us a level of distortion. If we have graphics under our clear, we may not be viewing it with utmost clarity and may look muddy.

Let's now level the surface with sand paper and bring the gloss back. What we now have is a level of gloss that has no surfaces to distort the light coming back to us. In fact a lot of that light will now penetrate past the clear, bounce around if you will, and then exit back to our eyes. The term for this is "refraction". The smoother our surface and clearer our surface coating is (clear) the more refraction we have, which equates to a higher allusion of depth.

More as I get into the cutting and buffing process. And did I say I hate clear?!