The Floquil Silver I chose turned out OK. Ideally I would have preffered a bit more of a sheen to it but I'm happy it went on evenly and I had no paint application issues thanks to my trusty double action Tamiya top feed airbrush (I love that thing!). I have to say for smaller models, airbrushing is the way to go since it gives you so much more control of the paint flow. But for larger model and mid-power rockets, rattle cans are still the most convenient option... but I digress.
I opted not to use the decals supplied by Estes due to the fact that there were some obvious inaccuracies. The most obvious error was the inclusion of a red line around the base of the capsule roll pattern. This red line was not visible on the A-001 round which I am depicting. I opted instead to use a decal set from Excelsior decals that was based on George Gassaway's excellent drawings and which was quite accurate. The only improvement I would suggest is to add a little rounding at the base of the capsule roll pattern.
The service module decals were fairly straight forward and as with the capsule roll pattern, I opted to cut out and apply each square individually to avoid having decal film lines wherever possible. The bolt pattern at the base of the SM was kind of tricky as it broke in a few places, but I was able to get it reasonably straight.
The booster "United States" decals were applied in 2 pieces (again to avoid film lines) and was a fairly straight forward decal application. One thing worth noting is that due to the corrugated surface I applied about 3 coats of Miro-Sol decal solvent to "soften" the decal and get it to sit nicely into the corrugations. I also made use of a few prototype pictures to make sure the positioning was correct with the "T" in "STATES" sitting just over the lower booster demarkation line.
Well that about finishes up the Estes 1/100 scale Apollo Little Joe II build. In the next post, I'll put up some pictures of the finished model.
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