funkey5

Jan 7, 2001
Sprayed the "finish" coat of primer on today. After letting it dry for a couple of hours, I dry sanded the entire thing with 600 grit to smooth it out. It feels sooo nice now!

My little handmade cap turned out well. I'll put a flange around it and some rivets to make it look like it's supposed to be there.

I practiced doing the glue rivets on a piece of scrap, but was dissatisfied with the way they looked when dry. I was using Elmer's glue and a syringe to do it. I've heard RC-56 works better, so I'll pick some up tomorrow and try again.

It's not as easy as I thought to make straight lines with the rivets! I'm sure after a few thousand it'll get easier. I don't have any full-size pictures with good rivet detail to go on, so my rivet placement is going to be guesswork.

Jan 15, 2001
After a few days away from it due to surgery, I started doing panel lines and rivets. I decided to do all the panel lines, then apply the rivets, as opposed to laying out the lines, riveting, then painting the lines, because I thought the paint might build up around the rivets as I sprayed the panel lines. Get it?

To do the lines, I used Chartpak tape, 1/32" wide. I applied the tape where I wanted lines, then sprayed primer over the tape with my little Badger airbrush. Kinda hard to see in the pics, but you can see the different shade of gray where the lines are.

The rivets are applied with a syringe with the needle point ground off. I'm using RC 56 glue in it. The hardest part is getting the flow rate down. At first, I was constantly applying pressure to the plunger as I moved along, but later found if I left an air pocket in the syringe, I just pressurize the air pocket by pushing in the plunger a bit. This applies pressure for quite a long time, and the rivets start getting smaller as the pressure decays so I know when it's time to push the plunger in some more.

The riveting process goes quickly. In about 2 hours I did the entire tail boom and fins, plus the front half of the fuse. I'm freehanding the rivet spacing and lines, so if one looks closely, they're not perfectly aligned, but overall it looks pretty cool with the rivets. I have to remember, this is my practice machine, so although I want it to look nice, I don't want to get too involved with it. I plan to spend lots of detail time on the Vario Jet Ranger I'm gonna do next.

I hope to finish riveting in the next couple of days, then on to painting!

Jan 16, 2001
Finished riveting! As I said, it goes very fast once you get flowing. It's really addicting. I find myself wanting to grab the syringe and put more on! The six pics to the left are after all the riveting is done. It's kinda hard to see the rivets, but they'll surely reveal themself once I get some gloss paint on it. If you've ever painted anything before, you know that one little piece of dust will look like a mountain in your paint. Hopefully, the rivets will look just right when it's all done. I purposely made some rivets small, some medium, and some large just to see how they look when finished. This heli is my experiment project as I've never done any riveting before, so I'm not so concerned with perfection. I'll save that for my Vario!

I'm gonna put a thin coat of primer over the whole heli to seal in the rivets, then the colors go on! More to come....