Big Girtha Build Painting the Engine Mount Part 15

I decided to paint and glue the engine mount in now before gluing on the fins. It's easier to get paint in all the recesses before it's glued inside the main tube.

With the long trailing fins of the Bertha design, it might be hard to position the mount correctly after the fins are glued on. The setting glue might lock it in the wrong place.

I sprayed just the back end, keeping the paint off the centering rings.

In the first picture, just the rear of the mount has been sprayed black, along with the engine hooks.

I like to have the engine hooks shiny, a little like the chrome trim on a car. I scraped the paint off the hooks with the back end of a hobby knife. Chances are, the paint will chip off the hooks anyway so I'd rather remove it now.

Scraping off the paint is easy along the flat back of the hook. To get the paint off the sides, I slid some card stock under the hook so the blade won't come in contact with the engine tube.

Now I can lightly scrape the paint off the sides of the hook using the tip of my hobby knife.

Here's the painted and scraped engine mount ready to be glued into the main body tube.

The centering ring looks rough, but it was sanded down to fit into the smaller body tube. The sanded edge will give a wider gluing surface.