Starting my fan racer...

[phatslappy]

Hi all, I'm finally starting my tanmen racer...using what someone had suggested earlier, I took an exacto knife and I split the main unit in two pieces. But in doing so, I put a lot of wear onto the model. There are scratches everywhere, some really deep. Unfortunately, I am very unskilled in the ways of the modeller. I think I'm supposed to use mr. surfacer to get ride of the scratches, right? So my question is, does mr. surfacer need to go on top of primer? or does primer go on top of the surfacer? right now I have some primer on the model because I was trying to paint it without taking it apart. that didn't really work out. And what do you use to get primer off? can I just wash it off with soap? After I take care of the surfacing, I will do some more reading on how to get the seam lines to come out...but one thing at a time...

[Valkyrie]

First of all, try resizing that pic

Seperating the rear section isn't a bad idea, since it will make painting a lot easier. It'll let you airbrush the two parts easily. But the downzise is that you added a lot to your clean-up job.

It would be best if you stripped down the parts before going any farther. The primer you used looks pretty rough anyway.

Then, use Mr. Surfacer and putty to repair the scratches and the joints where the two part will meet. When you reassemble them, they will both be fully painted, so you'll want to have as little of a gap as possible. So you'll want them to fit together like a glove before you even start painting.

To fix the scratches, throw on a little surfacer with a small brush, then sand off the excess with some fine sandpaper once it's dry. Once all your cleanup work is done, prime the pieces either with Mr Surfacer or Tamiya primer spray paints (stay far, far away from the automotive primers), or airbrush on some thinned down Mr. Surfacer (which is my current preference).