So yesterday was a working bee for the NMRA dudes in Brisbane - we went to work on the Free-mo modules that are under construction.
I got dobbed in by my mate Scooter, so I was to be Rembrant for the day, more like Picasso I reckon ;-)
I had come prepared with my gear to be able to lay down some good stuff - I have had a fair bit of practice before on the club layouts at RMCQ. I was using the nifty battery powered airbrush.
I made sure to bring the USB charging rig for it, as I knew I was going to need to run it past its battery capacity. It got some short recharges whilst we had coffees and smoko and lunch of course. But I also ran it with the charger plugged in, perfectly fine.
I had premade my paint for the day to save time, but just in case, I did bring some spare paint and the tools to make up batches of paint for spraying. I have in the past done a pile of testing of various colour mixes and come up with my recipe. I use the Tamiya Acrylic paints which are nice to use and not quite water based.
So I make sure to use their brand of thinners, the X-20A. Since in the scheme of things not much is used over time for the painting side of things, I buy the proper stuff - cost is fine. Cleaning is done with water, then IPA. Then for the airbrush I finish off the cleaning with the proper Tamiya Airbrush Cleaner.
So, the recipe. I have come up with a recipe of 33% Colour #1, 33% Colour #2 and then 33% Thinners. The remaining 1% is Aussi Bulldust. The colours have been tweaked after sitting down over a number of days and days a while back, mixing colours and spraying a test board with scrap track nailed to it. In this case we are using XF-51 Khaki Brown and XF-68 Nato Brown.
As required, you rinse out the measuring pippet so you can actually read the markings - just a small bucket of water at my side works fine. Another item to have are Ball Bearings. Yes, you can throw them at idiots near you, but they are much better for mixing paint. I use a dozen small 2-3 mm bearings in each bottle, then you can easily shake the bottle and get a good mix. Get them at hobby stores or online.
So you always keep the empty Tamiya paint bottles - as they are very handy to mix paint in and store it. So you line up a bunch of clean empty bottles and then with a cheap almost disposable pippet (available at hobby stores for about 4 bucks for 10, or online at all the usual cheap Chinese stores), you put in about 3 ml of the first colour, then 3 ml of the second colour and of course the remaining 3 ml of thinners. The Bulldust goes in as you are speaking to the other numbnuts with you. The amount of bulldust can vary...
Once the mixings are in the bottle, put the lid on and mix it. You could sit there and shake with your hand for a while, or get lazy and use a mixer. Again, get the online one for 20 bucks or so - they are Test Tube shakers or Nail Polish shakers.
Leave the ball bearings in the bottle - they only ever come out again when you clean the bottle after finishing it off. And of course if you are premaking a batch of paints - label the damn things!
