There Has To Be Titanium Right?

The F-104 Starfighter uses three types of metal on the tail of the aircraft. Aluminum is the most prominent as you would expect but there is also a large stainless steel panel on either side of the fuse and a number of titanium panels as well. Since this plane will be in the polished metal finish I must treat the titanium panels differently by airbrushing them with a water based translucent paint that will hopefully look like titanium.

To do this I took a piece of flight metal and placed it on a plastic sheet. I sanded it with steel wool to mimic the panel treatment on the plane and then masked off a number of sections for the experiment.

I tried spraying a number of colours and mixtures of colours onto the individual strips to see which one compared closely to the pictures.

                                      Once I decided I started to do the airbrushing a little at a time until I got the effect that I wanted. 

                                     The afterburner area was the first one I tried and it came out fairly decent so I moved on. 

                                          You can see the various panels on the tail section clearly on the tail section photo.

There is one more titanium vent panel that is not on the tail section but on the main fuse just in front of the tail section. I needed to first cut the vents open, they just don’t look right as it comes from the factory, and then flight metal and then paint them the titanium colour. 

Last note on this is I found out the hard way that these painted panels now need to be sealed with a clear coat or if any tape touches them it will lift off some of the paint. Oh that dam learning curve strikes again!