U.S.S. Atlantis - Step 8.5 (part 3), Primer

Now it's time to apply several thick coats of sandable primer to our main body tube and various balsa pieces. Our goal here is to cover up the body tube lines and any slight wood grain lines left over from the sealing process.

I was less than satisfied with the results I got from this particular brand of primer. While it covered well from a pigment standpoint, it's not a "high build" primer that fills in imperfections very well. After applying about 4 coats, I can still see spriral lines on the body tube and as an added gotchya, this brand of primer does not sand very well. Oh well, such is life. We will just have to live with it...

Sometimes, during construction of a model...any model, you will have to accept minor imperfections and keep in mind that what we are after is a model that is pleasing to the eye even though it may not look perfect under a magnifying glass. How often do we look at our rockets through a magnifying glass anyway. Now if I were building this for a contest, I would be more concerned with these issues and take additional steps to make the finish absolutely perfect, but I'm not doing that.

I will definitely not be repeating this finish method as I consider it way too much effort for the results I got. For my next project, I will be using a method I saw described on the Apogee Components website:

Apogee Components Basic Construction Tutorials

In the next step, we finally start glueing some of our balsa pieces to the main body tube. From this point on, it will start to look more like a rocket.