Higgs Boson - painting help or ideas?

[tymill]

After spending last week at CERN in a conference about the experiments running on the Large Hadron Collider, I'm all inspried for a new paint job for one of my cars....

This is a depiciton of a proton-proton collision event that might evidence the discovery of the Higgs boson as four muons are traced flying out. Nerdy, yes - but I love it....

exact accuracy of the diagram isn't too important, but I don't want it to look like a pile of spagehetti on the bonnet.

I'm thinking there must be a relativey easy way to paint this - perhaps with some kind of liquid mask that is scratched away on the particle tracks? Any ideas how it might be tackled? Looking forward to the challenge...

of course, I could also demonstrate the paintjob by driving the car at 99.9999999999% of the speed of light into something. ;) Here's some background: http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html and http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Science/Higgs-en.html

Cheers,
Ty

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/images05/CERN-Higgs.jpg

[emtee]

OMG... some people do lead very exciting lives don't they? OK, how about a starburst effect centred on the roof with the cuboids at the end of the light track down the car sides and front.. and anything else you can throw at it in the centre that you have the patience to cut out from the LM... and any relevant calculations picked out in old school LED red on the sills..?

Best of luck anyway...

"Houston, we have a problem.."

[hammerhead]

Id say freehand the yellow with paint splats behind it but the darker colour behind the yellow may be a a problem

[tymill]

been thinking about this one.

Might tackle the yellow lines using lots of very thin masking tape. ONly thing I'm worried about is that it will be stacked up pretty thick in places, so creep could be a real issue. but maybe if I spray lightly enough it won't be a problem. dunno.

Then I might try to use a brush and hand paint in the red spots.

Next hand paint in the blue marks with a brush.

Next spray the dark blue background

Finally pull the tape and shoot the yellow, backed up with white.


The other idea was perhaps spraying the whole inside with mask (not sure how to do this). Then, perhaps putting two No.11 blades sandwiched together into a hobby knife to double-trace in the yellow lines as thin stripes. (can you do this?) Next try to pull off the masking from everywhere but the yellow lines. Then continue as decribed above with the other colours.

I am concerned that it will look a bit like a bad spaghetti bolognaise though.... Hmm. it's just an idea...

Cheers for the ideas and feedback though - gets met thinking...

Ty

[McPhee]

The other option to consider as this is such a complex design would be to have a custom decal printed. I know it's a bit of a cop out but it may be worth considering.