Painting the frame black

I liked the black Comm8 frame a lot from the build at Tom's house. This week I put the skins back on the droid and used 4 straps to tighten up the gaps I got improvement on all of the gaps and redid some holes I'll later have to fix with JBweld on the skins. I decided that if I paint the skin mounting blocks black that will help hide any gaps I might have in the skins that I have left. Then thought why not take it a step further and and do the entire frame? So I painted the frame black so it will be a proper frame worth of R2-Q5. There's going to be a few places I paint copper to match the outside colors to blend together.

However some rain storms are slowing me down. It going to take all week until I the paint is dry until its ready to reassemble. I'm also working on making and painting the horseshoes for this droid too. I also painted the booster covers black. I have several parts in various states of construction.

Giving this droid the imperial stamp. I wanted to attend to every little detail on this frame I can so it says 'made by the empire' giving the droid a mere glance internally. This is the side electronic plate. I masked one side of it so it stays the some what yellow transparent look. On this side of the plate I painted primer on it. Then a nice thick coat of red paint and after that drys for a couple of hours I add my stencil I cut out of paper.

The idea here is to have a black plate that has a red imperial symbol on it. Thinking in reverse first we paint the entire plate red, then lay on the stencil and then paint the entire plate black.

Now a coat of black. I forgot to take a photo of the results but I wasn't happy with it. There was too much overspray of black misting onto the red. So I decided to do the other side but use magnets to hold the paper down tighter to the plate.

I'm doing the same thing to the other plate but using magnets to hold the paper down for better results. Versus just laying the stencil down and painting it.

This is more like what I'm looking for! But,the paint cracked on 1/2 of the plate on the black layer. I'm not sure why. Its kinda of cold today (65) and maybe the black was too close to the red coat of paint (2 hours).

So its back to the drawing board. I'll blast these plates with Goofoff and strip them of all paint, wash with soap and water, then primer and paint red again. Next time I'll let the red coat dry 2 full days. Until then I'm going to remake this stencil in material that's much thicker than printer paper. On top of that I'll add a few more magnets and I'm sure these side panel plates will be exactly what I'm looking for.

After two coats of goofoff and a flat scrapper that panel aboves paint is gone is now laying in the sun drying waiting for primer . I think next time I'll paint it aluminum looking and the other side copper. Next tot this plate is a horseshoe painted black. Next to that are copper painted shims that connect this side plate to the frame.