Zero Custom Paint. My new trick. I heard from a fellow modeller that Hiroboy (www.hiroboy.com) had a new range of custom paints and looking at his Gauloises Yamaha this paint was something extra. Hiroboy sells the paint in sets for your bike (like Blue, Black and White for the Konica Minolta bike or Flourescent Red and Mica Blue for Spiderman M1) Now I've been stocking paints for around ten different bikes and I'll keep getting them as they appear. Not getting worse by the fact that the paints come in a niete little package with the bike printed on the front.

Zero Custom Paint is a base paint wich means it dries flat and has to be covered with clear to get the right shine. Good thing with this is that you don't have to achieve that nice shine with a glossy paint at the right psi with your air brush. This way you mist it on in a couple of layers getting a good coverage and then lift the shine with clear.

Not much done on the kits the last month. I gues the Spiderman build scares me a bit and I tend to do most progress on the Kawasaki. I'll be honest and show you a pic of the formost reason for not building too much right now.

Our house has arrived! Just the outer walls in place but things are happening each day. Can't wait until we get to move in in August. As long as there aren't three kids in the family I hope to have a building room instead of going down to the basement in the next door house to do some painting.

As I'm doing my Desmosedici bikes using photo etch and front fork set from Tamiya I realize how "old school" I am. I like PE, I really do. That I don't like applying it is another story.. But these front fork sets, I don't know, they are pulling us closer to the diecast arena. To make the fork in seperate parts are a step that Tamiya should have taken long ago, in fact it's brilliant. But the PE front fork set idea is just a pretty lame way to make money. The fork set costs almost the same as the kit itself... If they would mold the forks split up as in the PE set it would be much much more easy to paint and I bet any builder would make the same result as with the PE set.

So, my conclusion. Given the separate parts in plastic, I would definately do without the front fork sets and in a way I feel like cheating using them. AND, why would Tamiya put a rear damper reservoir tank in their kits that doesn't even have the real shape, and then put a brass part in the PE set? It sucks big time if you ask me.