RE: Silk Covering Techniques
mred, thank you so much for your post. My fiance and I were picking over every word last night as we're attempting to learn the art of silk and dope covering. I think we're quickly becoming covering snobs, lol. So much so that we just stripped all the Monokote off a Super Sportster ARF last night to cover it in silk.
We do, however, have a few questions:
1) Our NorthStar test wing. I've attached a few shots of this wing. We silk and doped this wing using 1:1 thinned butyrate dope throughout with a paintbrush (no airbrush) using about 8-10 coats. It looks shiny on the non-painted side and the painted side is only a thin coat of Colorplace spray paint (cheap WalMart stuff), so it's not fully covered. We then went to test the fuel-proofness of this covering by just dripping some 10% 2-stroke glow fuel on it and let it sit for about a few days. We noticed a couple things. First, there seemed to be some spots where the oil had apparently soaked through (IMG_0440 is a zoomed out view that shows the darker soak spots, IMG_0441/442 shows a closer view of these areas). There are some runs in there, too, which I think is just putting the dope on too thick or too quickly, I'm not sure. Did we just not get it thick enough? The whole thing was shiny before we did the fuel test. Also, on 0444 and 0445 there are some areas you can see in the reflection that are 'raised' a little bit following the splatter pattern of the fuel we tested with. You can't really *feel* the bumps, but the fuel seems to have interacted with the dope. Is this normal? Is there anything else we need to be aware of?
2) You mentioned using an airbrush. We have a small model airbrush kit for use with small plastic models for our younger boys. Would you suggest a larger unit with a larger paint canister? Can you suggest any particular models?
The file names mentioned didn't come through, apparently, on the image views. The series starts with IMG_0438.JPG and goes through IMG_0445, in order.