Ok, the drama's over. :rolleyes They're both painted silver, and buffed smooth with some 0000 steel wool. You can pick out the base gray damage around the mandibles and the dent in this pic. Happy happy!
It'll be a while before another update, I think. Between two helmets and a 5-day business trip to SoCal this week, I expect 2 or 3 weeks to stencil in and mask up the gray.
I sprayed this helmet with Model Master Euro Gray 1 enamel from a rattle can (the hobby shop had no enamel bottles) about a week ago. I peeled the masking off tonight, but I still found the paint a little soft and smelling of solvents. We've had some kind of humid and wet weather over the last week, so that may have something to do with it. Here in the Canadian Prairies, it's usually pretty dry in and around the summer though. Some scratches are through the green or maroon paint and go all the way down to the silver; I left those masks on.
This helmet will still get a couple weeks to cure up the gray enamel before I start masking it up for the dome and cheek green. I'm learning from my mistakes on this one then applying the lessons learned on the FPH2. I have finished masking the scratch at the top of the dome and working my way from the back towards the cat-scratch over the right eye.
I just unmasked this helmet after it sat under the curing green paint lay for 1 week. The masking under the green came up beautifully, but the masking that went down to the silver layer was a little tougher to get out. The longer that mask sits, the more it bonds with its surroundings. Hopefully it will survive on my FPH2 until I get back from vacation in August...
After unmasking, I went over it with some 0000 steel wool to blend the stepped paint layers a little, then I went over it with a Mr Clean Magic Eraser to get rid of the stencil lines I could see. The white tide marks you see in the green paint are just the soap residue from the Magic Eraser. I'll rinse the helmet off really well to get rid of them.
And I know that the dent/killstripe details are a little too close to each other, but I'm not too fused about it. I did fix it on my FPH2 though.