The Nomad

You can see the camaro in the background, patiently waiting for more paint. It has been windy and cooler here the last couple of days and that is not conductive to outdoor painting.

Someday maybe I will get around to building an indoor paint booth, but until then, mother nature picks my painting schedule.

The nomad got its first coat of primer and surprised me, looking much better than I had expected it to considering the number of scratches that it had. Wet sanding, gotta love it...

The first primer coat is very important, especially on a model you are trying to restore. It will make defects show up that are very hard to see before you primer, and make some disappear as well. There are some defects where the side molding used to be on the nomad that I could not see until after I had primed it.

The first coat of primer is a starting point, one from which you can find small defects and perfect your body work on. Once you get the body close to how you want it switch to a lighter colored primer and re-wet sand it. High spots will show up when you sand through to the darker colored primer below, and you can find the low spots to fill and repair when most of the body has returned to the darker color, but light spots remain.

The use of foam sanding blocks is recommended to keep from creating low spots while sanding. Foam blocks can be trimmed to nearly any shape and conform to contours that a flat block will not. Foam sanding blocks can be found at nearly any hardware store.

All these tips take practice, so if you don't get the results you really want you can try again by either applying them to your next model, or stripping the one you are working on down and starting over. One nice thing about stripping paint, the newer it is , the easier it comes off.

Good luck, and keep building!