I just finished painting another canopy for my 450's. I planned for so much more than what resulted, but after having problems with paint peeling up, I finished it up with minimal masking and had to leave it fairly simple looking. I think one of my primer coats was laid on too thick ... too late to do anything about it now :(

Anyway, I took pictures as I progressed, so here they are:















This is what I did:

- Mask off the jagged edges of the checked flat
- Mask off the checkers
- Lay on some Indy Silver / Outlaw Black blend
- Peel off the checkers, and shoot a drop shadow around the edges of the flag
- I used some Hobbico Liquid Mask and masked off my jagged flag. Goes on as opaque, dries translucent.
- Removed the vinyl masking. Now I see some of the white paint peeling up.
- Shoot the Fluorescent Yellow to Fluorescent Orange fade
- Shoot a simple black windscreen, and some Fluorescent Red (turned out looking orange, because I did not want to mask it off and lay down some white for a background.)
- It's done. All that is left is a quick clear coat. This canopy turn out like crap, so I'm just going to use some of the aerosol clear coat junk.

-Farrell

I painted this several months ago, but just now realized I never posted photos. This is the first large canopy I ever painted, its an Align 600E canopy, for my TT Raptor 50 V2. It's also the first time I used my Roland SX-8 8" vinyl cutter to make some masks. I got a good deal on the cutter on eBay, and it came with a bunch of vinyl -- hence the flaming pink vinyl...

I did not realize how well regular vinyl would stick, so I managed to pull off some layers of paint when trying to remove my masks, and adhesive residue was left behind in many spots. After trying desperately to remove the residue, with everything from Goo Gone, to denatured alcohol, to Simple Green... I finally gave up and just shot my clear coat over it all before too much dust could stick to the residue. This made my canopy look like crap up close, but I can live with it for now. I'll just crash it all to soon anyway :)







-Farrell

I got home just as the sun had set, and heres some decent shots of the new canopy mounted on my T-Rex 450:





-Farrell