This is yet another one of those composite updates. I haven’t had a good long work session all week, but I’ve been trying to make a habit of doing some small thing each night – the age-old “touch the project every day” adage. This week, I’ve been continuing to get ready for doing the panel labeling.
Earlier this week I cut a couple test coupons from scrap to use for labeling experiments. Basically, I want to test my methodology for top coating things once the labels go on. I want to cover the labels with a good two-part clear coat, but I’ve read of builders who discovered that such a clear coat started dissolving the dry-transfer letters! Seems the best fix is to first spray a light coat of single-part clear, and then add the two-part on top for durability. In any case, I’m definitely trying this out on scrap before going to the real thing.
Also this past week, I took out the switch console and instrument panel parts, and removed all the components to get ready for painting. The main panel and console got cleaned and scuffed yesterday, while the panel wings needed a little more attention – I need to clean up some ugly marks on those before paint. And today, after a day full of events, I was able to go ahead and shoot primer and flat black on the panel and console. I figure I’ll let those cure for a few days before I do anything else – besides, I still have my top coat experiments to do.
In other news, my printed labels arrived today. I had a great experience with Luann at imagetransfers.com. Turns out the stuff I exported from my long-running Photoshop panel planner were not the right stuff for printing, but she asked me for the original PSD files and was able to recreate them as the vector art she needed – at no cost to me. Between that and having the labels in hand the same week, I’m pretty happy.
So the other fun today was doing a couple test applications on one of my test coupons. Everything on my label sheet has at least one duplicate to allow for mistakes and do-overs, plus as printed there’s some extra text – plenty of material for experimentation. The labels go on really easily, and look great. Now I just need to get the clear coat I need for top coating:
