How To Paint Scorcher License Plates?

[beetleman 51]

I am near finishing my original Sand Scorcher, and it seems I hit a brick wall near the end. The license plates. How on earth do you paint them? I airbrushed the plates with Tamiya royal blue. That was the easy part. But when trying to apply the lemon yellow I ruin the entire thing, and have to remove the paint and start over, which is a real pain. I tried tooth pics, que tips, and nothing. I then scratched my head and remembered how they paint real license plates. They use a roller that goes over the raised portions of the plate. So I made a 1:10 roller for that purpose. But arrrgggghhh! It does't seem to work either! Please see the pics to see what I'm talking about. PLEASE HELP!

[bad andy 6]

I haven't done my plates, as I haven't started any of my SRb projects.. so take this with a grain of salt. I HAVE painted numerous tires' lettering, very small ones at that. I usually use tiny tiny brushes. If I make a mistake, a little solvent and that same brush around the edges works fine to clean things up.

I do like your 1/10 roller idea though. Perhaps a harder surface for the roller? It looks like the raised lettering on the plates is just being "swallowed" by the roller. Maybe a harder surface would keep it from contacting the recesses of the plate?

just my $.02

[TA-Mark 195]

Paint the letters with flat white, flat yellow or white primer before applying the gloss yellow. You will get much better coverage as gloss yellow is a very translucent paint.

[Shodog 1835]

I would agree with this and add that I use a brush perpendicular to the raised lettering that way the tip of the brush won't get paint all over.

[Challenger-RT 0]

Just an idea - put some paint on a flat surface and press the plate carefully upside down into the wet paint. So the paint stays only on the letters. How about that?

[Badboy 94]

Or paint it yellow let it dry really well then spray it in blue, turn it upsidedown and then gently rub it on a plain/flat sheet of paper (copy paper)

and the blue will get rubbed of... Thats how Oldsterolli did with his plates for his mini chiquita scorchers...

Make shure that you don't rub of wrong parts...

Badboy

[HunterZero 76]

Paint the letters with flat white, flat yellow or white primer before applying the gloss yellow. You will get much better coverage as gloss yellow is a very translucent paint.

+1, this is the best advice, or paint the lettering with a couple of coats of flat yellow, then clear coat the whole numberplate.

Use a small paintbrush, ie something 0 size or smaller. Depends how steady your hand is.

Painting the numberplate gloss yellow then filling in the blue is another good idea. You can roughly paint the blue then clean overpainting on the letters.

Painting yellow and red can be very difficult, because they are transparent colors and usually require more than one coat.

- James

[slimmy 0]

I still need to paint my plates. I got some good ideas from this thread. Thanks for the great info.

[Corpse Thrower 16]

I painted yellow lettering first, then painted the blue over the top. After it dried a bit I polished the letters with polishing compound exposing the yellow.

[TamiyaDan 8]

.

[SB_Aust 42]

What a great thread! Some excellent tips here...

[Snakehands 124]

Mine didn't turn out too bad:

I probably will try doing them again after reading the tips in this thread.

[slimmy 0]

I love this thread. I have gotten some great advise. Now I need to give it a try.

[beetleman 51]

Well thanks everybody for responding with all your great ideas. For me painting the license plates was definitely the hardest step in restoring the original Scorcher. Even painting the shell was easy compared to this task. Perhaps if I wasn't so fussy I could have finished them on the first try and just live with the result. But I can't. It has to be the closest I can get it to perfection. That's what happens when your background is actually static modeling.

When I started this thread, the plates were deep in brake fluid. I decided to take a route suggested by some great folks in this thread. First, I painted the plates with Tamiya light gray primer for the next paint to stick better. A few hours later I sprayed the lemon yellow. A day later I sprayed them with Tamiya clear. I let dry for a couple of days because I knew the next step is the trickiest. I then sprayed the royal blue and after a couple of minutes scraped it off the letters gently with a piece of smooth thin cardboard (pizza slice carton lol), laid flat on the letters and moved in a short circular motion. This gave me the best result and left the minimum amount of touch ups required with a brush. I did however have to spend more time touching up with a 00 brush to achieve the final result.

The process was long and nerve wrecking. The last part with the blue I did about 3-4 tries per plate until I could settle for the result. By that I mean that in an attempt to take the blue off the letters I messed up the plate, rushed to the faucet, washed the blue paint off with a toothbrush, dried and resprayed. Thankfully the clear and yellow held strong and were unharmed by the toothbrush. Before the carton method I tried q-tips which were horrible. Also, I soon learned that timing is a factor. Too soon after spraying (less than 2 minutes) and too much paint comes off; too late and the paint sticks like crazy...

What can I say, Tamiya giving us a sticker in the re-re instead of these god awful plates was probably the smartest improvement imaginable.

Here is my result:

[kontemax 1725]

I suggest clear flat on the plates.

Max