I put a call out on AP a short while back for a bumper daisy cap. My 59 ROCKET had one missing.
Well Daniel came up with the goods and sent one up to me
. He had one that read " 100,000 WHEN LIT" but was in the wrong colour daisy. The correct GREEN colour daisy had "50 POINTS WHEN LIT" on it. Daniel had managed to pop the centre out of one of the daisies to do a swap over but the other broke as he was doing it... so... he sent both caps up to see if I could get the other one out or not.
What I did was lie the daisy cap flat and dribble a tiny amount of Acetone into the crevice where the centre cap meets the daisy surround... apply slight pressure and she just gave away. Acetone melts plastic too so you have to be careful and if you just leave it to dry off, the plastic becomes hard again and can be used.
But... I had another problem. The text I wanted " 100,000 WHEN LIT" was there but in blue and I needed red. So a change of colour is required.
Here are the two caps..
Ive never replaced the text before so I had to come up with a plan.
First of all, I scratched out the blue with the tip of a scalpel. The text sits in a tiny recess where it gets hot stamped. By scratching out the text I make the edge of the letter slightly more defined and in theory should assist me when I come to paint them.. Part way through the scratching out here..
Any remaining fragments of colour can be removed with a QTip dipped in All Purpose Thinners - loves to eat paint!
heres the text colour removed..
Now for the tricky bit.. filling in!
First of all... colour match
Im using acrylic lacquer here. The trick with this as in any colour fill using a brush is to select the right brush... I used a tiny 000 brush. You then have to balance this off with the paint being the right consistency. If its thick then you end up painting the colour in.. we don't want to be doing that. We need it thin enough so it fills the brush but when you touch a surface and then pull up just slightly, it flows off the brush and onto the surface you are painting. This way, the paint fills by itself and will naturally " fill" the recess. Too much paint on the brush and it spills over.. too little and you are kind of " forcing" it into position. Never try to do this kind of job in one hit. It never works. Several " fills" will serve you better.
Heres the first fill..
You can see above that the process isn't fool proof.. bit of hand sake ( damn those beers last night!) and over filled brush.
When the caps in front of you, you can see the edge of the recess against the shiny cap surface and with a flat sided craft knife I scratched away the excess to the edge of the lettering.
Now its possible to see just where the fill didn't reach some corners etc and so we repeat the process again and then again, rub back to the edge of the letters. A QTip point with a tiny amount of thinners is also good here.
So the paint fill got done twice and the finished cap is shown here..
Its as good as the original as the edges on these if you look real close isn't perfect and basically our cap has to match the other right?
And here she is installed on the left.. bumper light OFF
And bumper lights ON..
Looks the goods!!!... so much so, I might tackle that faded JET on the lower left bumper.
So there you have it... much better than buying a repro from PBR as they are good but just not quite the same.
Im also making new plastics for this game and will post on these once done ( im still chewing through the artwork!)
Cheers!!!
Gav
