I was curious on what you people think is the best way to do a camo job. Would doing the ol' masking tape the areas you don't want to paint, or do it up free hand....I have an air brush, but it's so much work to clean and change and such that using it isn't always worth is, especially for small jobs, what do ya'll think?

I find it all depends on the project. My Schwimmwagon I free-handed, while I used painters tape to get the hard edge required for the ambush pattern on my King Tiger.
For most German armour , later camo jobs were almost always done in the field by the user, while modern armour comes from the factory already done. Modern camo usually having a fairly tight edge.

For armor models I like using a product called Blue-Tak, which sticky putty used to apply poster to the wall. I could go on and explain how to do it but here is an article that illustrates it better:
http://ipmsstockholm.org/magazine/2003/01/stuff_eng_isaksson_lavat.htm

Cheers,

CDT Reimund Manneck
U.S. Army ROTC

Where does one find Blue-Tak? I've seen many a reference to its use, but have not found a place where I can buy it in the US. Is there a mail-order, or an equivilent here?

Bribo:
Check a Office Max or Staples, I think I've seen it there.
P.S. Where's our 1/35th Mh-53J?

Nate

Using the air brush is definitely the way to go. It's not really a lot of trouble if you keep in mind that the project you're working on was worth the time already invested and to put an air brush quality finish is the only way to go.
I do mostly WWII armor and I always freehand my pattern. Any hard edgeI use good old masking tape.

Hope this helps.

Don

As an aid to cleaning my a/b on the fly, I always keep the thinner I need in the largest a/b jar - to quickly clean out the a/b while changing colors.

I have an Aztek so I can just take my used tip off, throw it in a bin of the thinner required and continue with another tip and color...(thats why I love my Aztek!!)

The more you use your a/b the quicker you will become at changing colors and stuff. Practise makes perfect as it is said...

Cleaning the airbrush between color is simply a matter of taking off the color cup and dropping it in a jar of thinner, then taking an eye dropper of thinner and running that through the brush till the spray is clean. Next, dump out the color cup, run a pi[pe cleaner down the throat and swab out hte inside before adding the next color. Total time: under two minutes. It's worth it to me to get the kind of finish only an airbrush will provide. NOw if I splurged and bought some more color cups, I could shave the time between colors to blowing out the AB.

Nate, got to play with the 1:1 versions of the 53, I'd love to see a 1:35th job...

Thanks for the tip on the blue-tak, i'll check those out.

I'm with Brian on the whole Aztek nozzle system. It's great. The airbrush is great, the ease of cleaning is great, and most importantly, the results are great.