Someone e-mailed me and asked how I got the painted lines on my new wire-guided roads - as seen in the video I posted - so straight and straight-edged. They recalled that years ago when I did roads with Superstreets/EZ-Street road sections, I had used automobile pinstripe tape. Based on my experience - it curls and wrinkles after several months - I did not use that this time.
I painted all the lane marker, pedestrian crossing and other road marker lines using Post-It notes as masking tape. Real masking tape ("Painters tape") often holds too strongly and pulls the aged-asphalt-grey paint I mixed off when I remove it. I also have more than a few instances where capillary action pulls the paint seeps under the edge of the tape.
This time around, and getting almost perfect results every time, I used Post-Notes as masking. They do not hold as tightly but hold enough. They worked very well.
Paint will seep under Post It notes, too, but a) they are paper and this seems to slightly mitigate this, and b) I used a "dry brush" technique to apply the paint, keeping the brush wet with paint but not full of liquid, and dabbing the paint on trying to keep it from pooling on either edge (it helps to practice this on test samples first, but you get the hang of it). The dry brush technique results is a very light coat each time - the line is faint, just cloudy in places, after just you pass - but you go over the line and in my case I went back to do each line two or three or even four times. What I love about this, beyond the fact it works so well, is that it results in lines that are not bright, "new paint" white, but slightly faded looking . . .
