Sendhendrix
Member
I would expect that your film order from Aloft would come as a continuous piece, but it sure wouldn’t hurt to ask them.
Painting sheeted surfaces with clear film would look cool probably. You could probably use some kind of dye in alcohol to keep from warping it, and have a color-stain effect, or seal the balsa first before using paint to help avoid it soaking in. I built a Bird of Time sailplane once, and because the fuselage was so rounded I sealed and painted it...rattle can gloss black. It looked awesome until after a few landings caused a lot of hairline cracks that were visible in sharp relief. It made me wish I had an envelope of some kind of covering material over it. I don’t know if clear film would have helped. Open structures also would look neat up close, but depending on the kinds of models you fly, clear film may not help provide enough visibility. In any case, whatever you use to color the wood shouldn’t impede film adhesion, as long as the paint itself is stuck well.
To provide an anecdote about the adhesion of my particular batch of film, I have a sailplane that I first covered in colored tissue before ironing on clear film. (I wouldn’t recommend that, it doesn’t look good enough to be worth the effort in my opinion.) There were a couple of spots that I didn’t like how the film was going down so I tried reheating to lift the film off. A very thick colored fuzz of tissue was fused to the wood where the film had been, giving me a pretty good idea of how far the invisible heat-activated adhesive goes; far enough to go through tissue paper and still grab the wood underneath. This was in a spot where I had not used any glue under the tissue, by the way.
Painting sheeted surfaces with clear film would look cool probably. You could probably use some kind of dye in alcohol to keep from warping it, and have a color-stain effect, or seal the balsa first before using paint to help avoid it soaking in. I built a Bird of Time sailplane once, and because the fuselage was so rounded I sealed and painted it...rattle can gloss black. It looked awesome until after a few landings caused a lot of hairline cracks that were visible in sharp relief. It made me wish I had an envelope of some kind of covering material over it. I don’t know if clear film would have helped. Open structures also would look neat up close, but depending on the kinds of models you fly, clear film may not help provide enough visibility. In any case, whatever you use to color the wood shouldn’t impede film adhesion, as long as the paint itself is stuck well.
To provide an anecdote about the adhesion of my particular batch of film, I have a sailplane that I first covered in colored tissue before ironing on clear film. (I wouldn’t recommend that, it doesn’t look good enough to be worth the effort in my opinion.) There were a couple of spots that I didn’t like how the film was going down so I tried reheating to lift the film off. A very thick colored fuzz of tissue was fused to the wood where the film had been, giving me a pretty good idea of how far the invisible heat-activated adhesive goes; far enough to go through tissue paper and still grab the wood underneath. This was in a spot where I had not used any glue under the tissue, by the way.
