Monday 28th March

And so to painting.

I'm using Railmatch 1 pack etch primer onto the brass, black for the underframe and inside of the body and grey for the outside of the body. I buy the etch primer in the 125ml tins, and I drop a couple of M8 nuts into the tins to mix the pigment when I shake the cans. I'm using an Iwata Revolution airbrush between 20 and 30 psi. The instructions for the primer suggest adding 20% of the specific etch primer thinners for airbrushing. That's not nearly enough, I ended up about 50/50 paint and thinners. Thin coats applied from different directions. The solvent flashes off quickly and you can build decent coverage without waiting. Underframe first in black, inside of body in black then outside of body in grey. No need to mask since the Iwata is able to spray the black/grey interface accurately enough for the primer coat.

The grey primer is the easier to handle and apply and I'd be tempted to prime the whole thing in grey next time. The advantage of black primer on the underframe is that you can weather straight on top of it.

There's another 7mm learning, it takes more paint than 4mm (3 times more in theory). Obvious I guess, but the 4mm habits of a modelling lifetime mean that I mix too little paint first time. And another thing, I have a shonky old compressor that looks like it is made from a fridge compressor. Works well enough but it has a limited duty cycle. Amazingly I got all the primer on without having to stop and let the compressor cool down. My tarot reading shows a decent sized oil free compressor in my future.

That's the primer on, so the model is off to a warm place to dry. I'll give it 24 hours before the next paint. There follows the ritual dismantling and cleaning of the airbrush. The preparation and cleaning that goes with airbrushing seems like a big faff, but overall it is still much faster and tidier then brush painting something like this.

​Having seen the cruel photo I noticed a few paint defects that need fixing before I move on. Also a curious cobwebby effect around some of the detail. It was clinically clean before paint - curious. I'm guessing that the properties of one of the paints, maybe the paint and the atmospheric conditions, have created what look like tiny clumps of candy floss. Never seen that before. It brushes away easily enough with a soft brush. Even at 50/50 paint to thinners I wonder if it was still too thick, forming little filaments in the air? The wheels still spin freely, so no paint found its way into the bearings, and the springs still work.