OrtoLANparty learned the hard way earlier this week that you can't drink and custom. The glue turned on her, it ate through her paint and the plastic underbody. I liked where the car was going though, hopefully we get to see version 2.0.
I also had a bad experience with alcohol and a custom. On my Cobra R custom, which I made a plastic rear wing and a powerdome hood out of plaster, I rushed the paint job and had to strip it back to bare metal. That meant that I needed to redo the wing and the hood too...
Lesson number 2 for me has to be knowing when to stop. A couple of times I've added details with paint pens and I get to a point where it looks so awesome, but then I get carried away. A few times I've had to take my customs back a step to fix mistakes I shouldn't have made. I'll use my Mustang again as an example. The black pen I had was too thick to darken the grille. I got impatient though and tried anyway. Of course, I smeared the black paint just about everywhere but the grille, so I had to respray the whole front end.
It doesn't look too bad from far away, but up close you can still see the fibers from the paper towel I used to try to clean up my mess. The red paint didn't cover the black 100% either. I should have stopped after the headlights, which came out awesome.
The last thing I learned I discovered on my first custom. Blue painters tape isn't magic. Paint will bleed through. I was hoping for nice, crisp lines but it didn't work out that way...
What mistakes have you made that you were able to learn from?