Interestingly enough, with enough ballast in the nose to fly well (8 bb shot) it still doesn't have enough weight in the nose to sit on the nose gear...curious.
There is one other modification. I used a rather aggressively pitched, six inch, Ikara propeller instead of the five inch "red prop" in the kit. This gives more thrust and still gives enough prop clearance for R.O.G....or at least it would if the model would sit on its nose gear.
The flying surfaces are covered with yellow Esaki tissue. Having run out of silver Esaki I covered the fuselage with kit tissue, misted on some Krylon #1305 and sprayed it with metallic silver, Design Master floral spray. The color scheme is taken from a real Cessna that was, unfortunately, written off in a hard landing accident in 2014.
I had a minor disaster when I used a new paint pen to draw the door outlines on the fuselage. The line bled badly on the floral spray painted tissue. It looked terrible! The paint in the pen is waterproof and I was about to respray the fuselage when it occurred to me that the paint might not be alcohol proof.. Sure enough, 91% alcohol and some Q-tips took the paint right off. Unfortunately, it also took off some of the floral spray leaving a smudged outline where the bad door outline had been. I still had to re-spray the side of the fuselage but I already had markings and windows in place so I had to mask. This is where I first used Frog Tape For Delicate Surfaces. It worked beautifully and did not damage the tissue or painted surfaces at all. I would have normally used air brush frisket, but I had no spray bleeding at all with the Frog Tape. It's something I'll be using from now on. (No, that was simply a tip, not a paid commercial!
Keep 'Em Flying!
Howard
