For the last 23 years, I have always enjoyed building, painting detailing and flying model airplanes, but like many modelers I tend to have less time every year for these type of projects. I have disliked the concept of ARFs mainly because I truly enjoy the building process. Last November while on a trip to San Francisco, I stopped by Tams shop and walked out with an F-16 and a Hawk.
The ARFs that Tam sells are very nice quality and the paint jobs are good for many modelers out there that don’t have the experience or equipment and of course time. Tams builders will kindly Pimp your Jets for a fee of course. The process is to sand down the airframe, airbrush the panel lines, sand the excess off, put the decals on and then clear the airframe again. I was going to have my f-16 done by them but lack of time prevented this form getting done.
This being said after finishing the building of my F-16 I was reluctant to sand the airframe down, so I took my trusty detailing pen, loaded it up with aerolofts ink and proceeded to go over all the panel lines. I didn’t sand the airframe down nor re shoot the clear over the panel lines since I want them to wear down over time.
On the Hawk I was faced with a different dilemma, the whole airframe had too much paint on it; this meant that all that detail and rivets that were put on the mold were pretty much lost. Sanding the airframe down and applying paint remover to get the paint out of the rivets and panel lines didn’t make much sense since this was a painted ARF. I have seen this happen on many ARFs and modelers have done different thing to bring back the detail. Recently on one of the forums I saw a modeler applied rivets similar to Promarks rivets to his ARF f-18, sadly the size of the rivets are no where near the size of the ones on that airframe, not saying anything bad about promark rivets since I use them myself.
I decided to apply a technique that I learned years ago from modelers like Bob Fiorenzi and others.
Burn my rivets on, I took my lathe and made a new tip for my soldering iron, if you don’t have a lathe I am sure a machine shop will make one for no more that a few dollars.
The method is simple since you already have a riveted airframe, just go over the rivets that are marked and put as many more as you like.
The process is fairly simple, my soldering iron gets to the correct temperature but you need to try this on a test peace, if your iron gets to hot, get a light dimmer and use that to regulate the amount of current reaching your iron to adjust the temperature.
When you apply the tip to the airframe you will feel the tip melt through the clear take the iron of and do the next, this is about 1second burn.
Take a moist rag and rub over all the rivets that you just made to get the burned paint off.
Take water-soluble tempera paint and brush it over the rivets.
Take a moist paper napkin and go over the area to remove the paint of the surface you just worked on,
On some areas like red painted rudders you might want skip the tempera pain or use very little, the rivets will have some white since parts of the red paint will come off.
I sincerely hope this helps modelers who would like to personalize their ARFs with out going through the work with paints.

Nice Job!

That really looks nice!

Bob

I just started the rivet detail a couple of days ago, using a soldering iron and some differing sizes of brass tubing. It really works nicely.
I made a template for the rivets using G-10 and drilled a series of holes with the appropriate size holes for the brass tubing. This really
makes it easy to get fairly straight rows while speeding up the process considerably.

Talk to us about the coloring you did. Looks great. Would you be willing to write a piece for the JPO Knowledge Bank on weathering techniques?