Dome Paint Part I: The Blue Bits

OK, so while I was waiting on the other paint jobs to cure (and since the hackerspace is closed on New Years Eve), I decided to start in on the dome. Now, the dome consists of an inner (solid) dome, and an outer one with all the bits and pieces cut, as you can see here:

So the first thing to do is to break those pieces out so that they can be painted.  A word of caution: it is possible to break things more than you want to, as I found out when inspectign the dome:

(It wasn't me.)

Anyway, using some reference photographs, I went around the dome removing all the bits that needed to be removed and sorting them into blue, silver, or scrap.  When I was done, I had a nice set of stuff to be painted:

(Note the top half of the large data port in the corner.)

Now, before you can paint, you have to do a little fixing. See, these were attached to the outer shell with little "tabs" of plastic, and they're still there. See here:

So it's a question of getting rid of those tabs. Depending on circumstances, sometimes I used a file:

Quite a few fell victim to the sanding block:

Anyway, when it was all done, I gave everyone the Krider Blue treatment and in between coats worked on removing the "tabs" from the outer dome so that it would be ready to paint. Hopefully I'll be able to get a few coats down on that tomorrow before heading out to the hackerspace and printng off some more parts. Vacation is almost over.