Connectamabob's black hole sun

[Connectamabob]

Unfortunately due to a one-two combo of past procrastination and current Murphy's Law density, this will not be ready by the deadline toady. It will still be finished, and soon, but it will have to migrate to the "future wars" board.

Could go into detail, but it's late (well, technically it's well past late and is now early), and I am tired from spending all night wrestling with one thing and another. Will post again after I've had some sleep and am back to firing on the proper number of cylinders.

[von Lucky]

All the best and sorry to hear. I hope to see this beauty done soon.

[McMordain]

Sorry to hear that.  I was really interested in this.

[marianas_gamer]

Sorry to hear. This was a very worthy entry that I enjoyed following. Still, will be very nice to see finished.
LB

[Connectamabob]

Hokay, so what happened was basically a paint issue. Long story short: the only model paints I can get locally are Testors Model Master brand, which turns out is completely unreliable crap for airbrushing. The flat black I was trying to spray as a light mask refused to behave to a positively trollish degree, and I eventually ended up having to do a full tear down on both my airbrushes at 3:00 in the morning on Saturday.

I'd had some issues with the colors I'd used to paint the disc (the tans worked OK, the blue was borderline, and the red-brown was total pre-clotted crap), but I was unprepared for how sadistic the black would be. Seemed OK in the pot, thinned and strained OK, but then when I went to paint it went crazy: watery one moment, heavy the next, clogging on literally every other trigger pull. Could not get even remotely consistent lines to save my life. Instead of being able to control what I was doing and paint what I'd planned, I had to just hope if I kept adding random lines and painting over the webby splotchy bits it'd turn out passable to the untrained eye. When I turned the LEDS on to check my progress, I discovered it had absolutely no opacity, so the whole thing just looked like crap when lit up. I had no options at that point. No time or money left to get better paint, or on-hand ways to fix things.

When I went to clean the brushes, I found the stuff rapidly turning gummy inside, so I had to do full tear downs and very intensive cleaning. Man, I thought Stynylrez primer was tenacious, but this stuff was like tar. And one of those ABs I've only used for watercolors before, so it's not like there was any stray chemicals in there for the acrylic to react to or anything. This was just what the paint itself was doing to itself by itself. I will never even look at Model Master paints again. The huge inconsistency between pots was already damning enough, but this was just... wow.

Good news is nothing's been seriously damaged or anything. I'll just strip the fire planet and redo it once I've got hold of some decent AB-able paint, no worries. And the disk never got touched by the back tar, so that's still fine. It was only the last minute time aspect that forced me to bow out.

[Constable Bertrand]

  what a nightmare. I'm glad the whole things not ruined!!

Hope you can finish it at some point.
Matt.

[von Lucky]

Oh I'm happy there's a semi-happy ending there!

[Mr. Peabody]

Damn. That's rotten luck of the worst degree.

[Connectamabob]

Hokay, time to get this flywheel spun back up again. Here's what the fire planet looked like at deadline time (thumbnails should be clickable to enlarge, if I've got my stuff right):

Unlit, under normal room lighting:

Lit up, under normal room lighting:

Lit up, with room lights turned off:


Just Tamiya clear orange, then Model Master black in these pics.

With time to think, I decided it's salvageable with some work maybe. That transparency I was lamenting might enable this. So I've got some Tamiya black (which sprays MUCH better than the Model Master stuff), and am in the process of refining it. Not pic worthy today, but getting this thread updated is my way of kicking myself in the pants.

[Mr. Peabody]

Well, it sure looks good in the pictures. Much more like something from a planetarium than I was expecting. 

Keep at it and watch out for space litter. 

[Vanvlak]

Wow. That DOES look good. 

[Andym]

Great! That really looks the part!

[OSHIROmodels]

That looks the nuts 

Glad you're carrying on with this 

cheers

James

[von Lucky]

Same - keep at it.

[Mako]

Looks pretty cool!

You know, if you were to attach a black shop vacc hose to that hole in the disk, with/without a working remote switch to turn it on, you could have a working black hole.

;-)