Ok then… now for the part that was scaring me most about this restore!! This is without doubt the most challenging restore I’ve taken on yet! First thing I had to do was sand off as much of the old paint as I could from this section. I had already scanned this area from a second PF that I bought with this game, that was too far gone to restore. It was my original intention to redo this area as a decal, but after much thought I decided to try my hand at repainting it instead.
After I’d sanded (with 320 grit wet/dry, sanded dry) as much of the crappy enamel paint that some tool had slapped on there, I wiped it over with prepsol and rags, then laid a piece of clear adhesive contact over the whole area for masking, and carefully cut out the area to be painted with a sharp hobby knife.
The 1st pic shows the primer filler coat before being sanded back with 400 grit paper on a rubbing block.
After id blocked it back smooth and wiped it down with Prepsol, I decided to try something new… I came up with the idea of printing the scanned images I’d done earlier, and using these to trace the art details back onto the PF with carbon paper.. thus giving me lines to paint to!!
2nd pic shows the clear contact laid down and cut out for the white sections, and the 3rd pic shows the white done… well I actually missed a couple of small spots of white I discovered later on when doing the black detail lines, I was able to brush paint these in, so was not a big deal. I used the same technique to all of the colours, one colour/section at a time. Some sections I used normal masking tape but the majority of the masking was done with contact.
Last pic shows the red and some of the orange done... traced on, masked off with contact and sprayed on. Red first, then orange. Each area where the colours meet I carefully and lightly sanded with 800 grit sandpaper to smooth out the joins