Tuesday, April 13, 2010

MGIJ WIP 4 - Paint filtering

I love posting about the mundane aspects of modeling. Ugh. One more time!

Let me tell you two things about me.

One thing that sucks. I know something isn't going to work but I want to see just how badly it won't work. Actually I'm hoping that I'm going to be wrong and that it actually will work. My initial instinct is usually right though.

One thing that's good. I'm a tenacious son of bitch. Sorry mom.

So basically I'm painting and I'm using old enamel paint from like... 10 years ago.There's some dried up paint in the bottle but I add some thinner and mix it up hoping that it will dissolve and spray OK. I know this is a bad call and that it's probably not going to work but... let's try anyways.

Of course it didn't work because some of that undissolved stuff got into the airbrush and jammed it up. Cleaning out the airbrush was like cleaning the shower drain. I saw some pretty nasty things and I was like "wtf? What is that and how'd it get in here?"

That said I've pretty much become an expert in disassembling and cleaning my airbrush.




I decided that I'm going to filter this paint just to see what's going on and get some usable paint out of this whole thing. Begin the filtering process. Basically I poured all the paint into a paint tray and then filtered it slowly by allowing the paint to trickle down my paint rod into the jar leaving the 'sediment' or whatever it is behind. I'd then wipe that out and repeat. I did it about 5x or so until I was left with pure smooth paint in the jar.

What I found in the paint trays was a bit unusual though.






Some type of crystal/jelly type of material. I have no idea what it is but large chunks of it were getting stuck in the airbrush. Smaller particles actually sprayed onto the part I was spraying giving it a rough almost gritty texture. I didn't like that.



So I sanded it down with some 320 grit paper. It was a bit rough but it was what I had laying around and I didn't feel like going to find my 1000. I figured It doesn't matter since I'm spraying over it anyways and the part is supposed to be flat black so shine/texture doesn't really matter. Of course I don't want it to look TOO rough but the 320 was fine.


Sprayed again with the filtered paint plus a bit of extra black. I was hoping for a flat look but I got some gloss! It's nice! It feels like I got kind of a mirrored surface here and I really wanted to protect that for some reason. I might just keep it like this.

The good thing about experimenting is that sometimes you end up with results that are better than what you expected.

That said, it's not perfect. I can still see a bit of the sanding lines, a couple tiny sediment pieces in the paint. Very tiny and you've have to be looking really close to see them but it's within my margin of imperfection and I can let it go.

Onward. Slowly but surely.

5 comments:

  1. well experimatnig can be... tricky? don't know how to call it. I'm working on a F/A-18D and canopy had some scratches so I sanded it with 1200 (wet) but then it looked foggy, it wasn't bad it was still transparent and propaly would look interesting but I decided to remove it. so to polish it I first used toothpaste... no effects whatsoever. then nail laquer, it would be ok if it wasn't old one..., i wanted to remove it so i used nail laquer remover and it didn't work... overytthing was milky white, so i decided to leave it in turpentine for a few hours, it helped a little but it also made the plasitic so weak and brittle that it broke the moment i touched it... now i can't put the kit in a flying mode thath i inteded to, I 'm afraid i will have to scratch build somehow the fragment of it cause it's needed for the open mode, or scratchbuild a completely new one... but how?

    anyway lookin forward to seeing IJ completed :)

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  2. wow sounds tough! i dont envy you my friend. that definitely seems like a hard situation!

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  3. I did a lot of experimenting on my airbrush when I first started using it. And it took awhile until I got things going smoothly (I had the issue of shooting out cobweb that you experienced before). And it is the 'figuring out how things work' that was very fun for me, as is for you I presume.

    And now I don't airbrush with anything else but laquer paint.

    I want to see your completed IJ soon!

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  4. I'm still using cans of spray here, mainly because I cant afford a decent airbrush and also that I tried an entry level airbrush which ran on cans of propellant, the results were kind of not good... think I need to level up a bit before I try again.

    Your airbush looks like something out of Star Trek! :)

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  5. LOL like one of the old school phasers?! haha it feels that way sometimes! zap that piece!

    one thing i didnt want from an airbrush was one that ran on propellant. i wanted a compressor. and a quiet one too. my airbrush is perfect for me. so far at least.

    G.G. - i hope i can! but i really do take my sweet time with these things sometimes... i try to do a little bit each day, even if its something small. just gotta make sure i keep moving forward!

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