As we wait to get the chassis back from another shop I thought it would be good time to polish some aluminum.. :shocked:
This is the best of both worlds, you get the ease of working with fiberglass but the beauty of polished aluminum...
Fran again I would like to complement you on the quality of fiberglass used on your RCR product.. Prepping the underside was much easier than some of the other fiberglass bodies we have had to work with..
Larry this owner of the P-4 had us prep,aluminum plated and polish the doors, rear section and cockpit area.. We had to fabricated some panels for the cockpit and with that the total was around 3600
Jim That's my old 1/7 scale P-38 that I sold a few years ago and its here for a few repairs and a fresh polish. I attached some photos of my Nick Ziroli design 1/5 scale P-38 that sits in my office. It wasn't even finished when it was the magazine did an articular on it. My son in law has somewhere around 600 hours into it so far and I stopped counting my hours a long time ago and still not finished.. We did all the fabrication and yes it balsa wood with a very thin layer of fiberglass. Once we had the glass nice and smooth I aluminum plated it. Its has details like working Fowler flaps, retractable gear, brakes 3000 screw and yes a moving pilot. I hope to see it fly sometime next year..
A quick overview of our plating process:
We Prep the surface to be plated making sure the porosity of the subsurfaces are all the same before plating.
We heat metal up to a liquid state, we add a carrier product at the same time the metal is atomize over the surface with our custom made digital equipment.
The surface is then flash cooled to prevent any damage to the subsurface..
Once plate our metal takes on all the characteristics of its solid counterpart. We can polish it out or add some effects with steel wool or scotch bite. It will oxidize if not maintained and some customer want that. We can eve speed up the aging process with patina solutions.
Here's a close up of the detail work we did to the aluminum for the photo shoot. Its been polished back to a shine since and we will age the skin to replicate the full scale Lightning Im modeling after we get a few flights on her.
Man that P-38 is absolutely amazing. I have ben an RC pilot for years and have always loved the P-38. Is there more info on your build of that model available anywhere?
Mark I documented the entire build on RCU and I attached the link if your up for some reading. Its long but if nothing else you mind find it entertaining :shy:
That process is absolutely one of the coolest things I have seen anyone do in a long time. I did not even know that it was possible to do something like that.