East Barnet Joint Stock - a workbench

[Jon4470]

Chas

I also wonder if the linseed oil might make satin paint more glossy. It will be interesting to see the results of your experiments.

 

Jon

[Chas Levin]

7 hours ago, John Tomlinson said:

 

The spontaneous combustion is a serious point, I know of it happening once. Teak Oil is simply Linseed thinned down. I've used it on oak windows and doors to bring out grain as well as weather protection. Inevitably there are brushes and rags involved. One chap who came to see mine went home and tried the same. He chucked all his damp oily rags in the wheely bin. Sometime around 1am the following morning he was woken by the sound of a fire engine, called by a neighbour as the flames from the bin licked the side of his house!

 

I suspect there's a lot less risk from the small quantities you'd be using, even so...

 

John.

Indeed! I read up a bit and apparently, when the oil is exposed to air it oxidises and the reaction creates considerable heat, relative to the amount of oil involved. It's not a problem with an oiled floor or window frame of course, because the oil is spread out very thinly and the wooden surface is exposed to the air itself, allowing the heat to dissipate.

 

The situation is quite different with oil soaked rags, especially if they're scruched up and put in a pile, let alone in a bin, because the heat can't dissipate quickly enough and builds up... Was your friend charged for a new bin by the council? I bet ours (Barnet) would have done that!

 

As you say, extremely unlikely to be an issue with the amounts I'll use but nevertheless, forewarned is forearmed.

[Chas Levin]

6 hours ago, Jon4470 said:

Chas

I also wonder if the linseed oil might make satin paint more glossy. It will be interesting to see the results of your experiments.

 

Jon

Yes, I wonder that too, along with Mike Trice's point about transparency. I'm not too worried about increased glossiness however, as I'll be varnishing over it anyway: the centre black of the lining is gloss too and it looks it, unlike the white, which is gloss but hides the fact well.

Also, once the gloss GNR Dark Green arrives from PPP I'll also be trying that and I suspect I may end up using it, though possibly still with some oil added. I never mind waiting for things like that to arrive in the post, because it gives more time to think about how you're going to do the job and sometimes I come up with good ideas during these times.

 

I've been re-reading sections of Ian R's book again (there's no padding, it's packed with info and it's impossible to take it all in without multiple read-throughs, though I find that once you've actually tried out a technique it sticks, in a way that just reading about it doesn't) and he mentions letting down paint with linseed oil a couple of times (though without specifying mix ratios) which I hadn't remembered being in there, I guess because when I last read it I wasn't considering doing that myself.

 

I also spotted something immensely useful that I'd missed, about filling in wider areas with the pen and which has made it seem less daunting: he rules a thin line of the filling colour (in this case dark green) alongside the previous colour (in this case the outer white lines) and allows that to dry overnight, filling in the remaining area with the pen the next day. This is quite a weight off my mind, because I'd been concerned that the time taken to achieve a really neat straight line alongside the white would eat into the drying time considerably and make blending the first and last painted areas much more difficult. Doing the adjacent straight lines in a separate session means I can do the wider filling in much more quickly 😅.

 

I still think there'll be a visible join between that thin line and the rest of the filled-in area, but I'm assuming it must be imperceptible, certainly at normal viewing distance. And if this way of doing it is good enough for Mr Rathbone... I'll try this technique out on my practice panel at the same time as I start experimenting with the linseed oil.

[Chas Levin]

Right, some early results - I've actually been Watching Paint Dry and finding it absolutely fascinating!!

 

First test was to compare the drying times of satin and gloss, PPP P752 GNR Dark Green, both brand new tins, never previously opened, using two thickly brushed patches, ambient temperature in the room 14 degrees C. Each photo shows the two patches, satin on the left, gloss on the right, with the stopwatch - apologies for the sometimes poor focus and/or framing, I was juggling the phone with trying to get the right angle for the light to reflect off the paint etc. Hopefully, the photos speak for themselves, showing the paint drying as the time ticks by, starting 15 seconds, with both equally wet:

 

 

Two minutes in and there's still almost no discernible drying - this was not what I'd found with an older tin of satin, so I was quite interested by it:

 

 

Three minutes in however, you can see the start of drying around the edges of the satin:

 

 

Skipping forward another four minutes and it's unmistakable in both, already reaching the stage where trying to join another line to it would result in a visible join or bump, unless you were able to re-activate the edge with thinners:

 

 

Once the drying has started it seems to accelerate (in some sort of chaing reaction as the longer molecules are formed, I'm assuming) and this is the position only another minute later - it's more difficult to see in the gloss because the appearance doesn't change in the way it does with satin, but it was quite apparent in real life:

 

 

After ten minutes - and you can see that considerably more drying has taken place - I decided to try some white spirit at one edge, followed by some additional paint, to see whether a newer application could be made to blend and to see whether the results differed between satin and gloss:

 

 

The results of that were predictably poor - here's 17 minutes, followed by 21:

 

 

 

And here's one of the last photos I took of this test, at 32 minutes, at which point both the original applications are almost entirely touch-dry and no longer allowing digs to disappear, though the gloss is still tacky:

 

 

You can see that the later application areas are well on the way to drying too, but there's been almost no blending except a small area on the lefthand side of the gloss, where the two merge and I was a little more successful with the white spirit first.

 

The other small marks you see are where I scratched the surface of the paint a little, to try to gauge how far it had dried by seeing whether the marks settled back in, especially with the gloss.

 

In fact, the difficulty of seeing how dry the gloss is makes these photos less informative on their own than I'd hoped, but in summary, I found that the drying times between satin and gloss in this test were so close as to be almost indistinguishable.

 

This contradicts what various people with a great deal more experience than me have found (gloss is widely reported as drying more quickly) so I'm going to do a second test but this time using bow pens, as the very thick and very uneven brushed patches in this first test might have affected the result, or at any rate made judging the drying speed more difficult.

[N15class]

Nice experiment, you'd need a calendar for my red buffer beams, still not dry.

[Chas Levin]

10 hours ago, N15class said:

Nice experiment, you'd need a calendar for my red buffer beams, still not dry.

I wish I could remember what I did when I had that with Humbrol red gloss - I did some seats to go inside a coach, first coat red, then a thinned brick colour so the red would show through, like worn material (ha - as if you can even see the seats themselves through the 4mm coach windows!) and the gloss red stayed tacky for goodness knows how long.

 

Just been reading about similar issue in fact in the PPP "The Finishing Touch" book and from the sound of it, you should be OK providing you simply wait long enough, but I realise that my not fit in with your schedule...

[N15class]

I have a feeling a few more days it might of cured. I blast with the hairdryer every so often. I have about 30 days left, so I can wait a little more. I just don't want to be an old man when it's finished.

[Chas Levin]

Following on from the previous paint drying time experiment, I repeated the comparison between PPP P752 satin and gloss, but this time using bow pens (a Haff 228 and 135). I painted two short thick strips, each done by drawing four touching lines as described in previous posts. In order to start the two stripes drying as nearly simultaneously as possible, I opened and mixed both tins first (they're the same ones as in the previous test, only being opened here for the second time since new), very quickly loaded both pens, popped the lids on the tins (prioritising the new tins' contents' lifespans over this experiment, of course!) and drew both sets of lines within about ten seconds; as you'll see, that ten seconds' difference didn't turn out to be significant.

 

Here's a series of photos showing the progress of the drying, satin above, gloss below (apologies again for poor focus):

 

Both types of paint dried noticeably quicker than in the previous test, but I believe that's due to the much thinner and more even application here with the pens, as opposed to my very liberal daubs with brushes last time - thicker coats will always dry more slowly.

 

The gloss seemed to settle noticeably between seven and eight minutes, but I'm not sure whether that was actually indicative of significant drying or whether it was a visual effect of the light. Around eight minutes I realised that as in the last test it was difficult to tell how dry the gloss actually was, so I scored a small line across each stripe, partly to see how it looked - and felt - as the paint was disturbed, partly to see to what degree (if any) the mark settled back in: as you can see from the almost total lack of subsequent change in those scored lines, both strips were pretty far advanced in their drying and, as the final photo shows, they were pretty much touch dry after twelve minutes.

 

It seems to me that the satin and gloss dried at almost exactly the same rate in this test, as they did in the previous one. If there was a difference (and I readily concede that the gloss may have dried fractionally more slowly without my realising it because the surface appearance doesn't change) then it was very slight indeed, too slight I think to justify using gloss over satin. This test also replicates more closely the conditions of the actual model in terms of the application being by pen rather than brush and in the sort of size of area, so if there's so little advantage in using gloss, I'll stick with satin: it's one thing dulling down the gloss of the black and white lining, but if all of the dark green were to be gloss too, I can foresee possible difficulty...

 

I'll do one further test, between old and new tins of satin (which are also thought by some to dry at different rates) and by that time some things I have on order - small pipettes etc - will hopefully have arrived and I can start investigating linseed oil...

Edited April 27, 2022 by Chas Levin

[Chas Levin]

One more test using unadulterated Phoenix Precision P752 GNR Dark Green, to compare an older 14ml satin tin (started a couple of months ago and already only half full (because of the amount of practising I've been doing) with a new one, being opened here for only the third time since new.

This was stimulated after reading the Craftknights article from the link posted by @Jol Wilkinson, which mentions the belief of the author that newer tins (from which less carrier has evaporated) dry noticeably more slowly than older tins, which may contain paint that's already thickened and has less carrier left. That did seem to chime with my informal observations, so I repeated the type of test in the previous posts, comparing the two tins' contents - old paint above, newer paint below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This time, unlike the satin-vs-gloss tests, it definitely seems to me that paint from the newer tin dried more slowly than that from an older tin. And bear in mind, what I'm calling an 'older' tin isn't exactly ancient, having only been opened a few weeks ago, though it's been used quickly which means there's a sizeable amount of empty airspace above the paint and that's well known as a way to accelerate carrier evaporation.

 

So, it's The Linseed Experiment next - sounds like a Frederick Forsyth novel!

Edited May 1, 2022 by Chas Levin

[Chas Levin]

So, my first experiment with linseed oil and there's no question of its effectiveness as a retarder, slowing down drying time very considerably, even at what I would consider a very low level of addition:

 

In an ambient temperature of 20 degrees C, 0.25ml Rustins Raw Linseed Oil was added (by scale-marked pipette) to 5ml PPP P752 gloss GNR Dark Green, a 5% dilution. I'm using gloss for these first tests because I have stock of it and having decided not to use it on the C2, I can use it without worrying about running out. It's harder to observe the drying process with gloss however, so once I've tried some different concentrations and got ued to it, I'll swap to satin/dull.

 

 

After mixing, the paint was noticeably less viscous than it is fresh out of the tin. I'm not sure if this was the oil, the ambient temperature or both, but I'll do some further tests in cooler temperatures to try and find that out; it was quite a bit more inclined to overflow from the pen, which therefore needs to be very lightly loaded to minimise the weight of paint pushing downwards and outwards.

At 5 minutes, intersecting lines can be added joined to the first strip and blend in almost immediately, no visible drying at all.

At 8 minutes, new intersecting lines (still done with the first loading of the pen) can still be joined/blended but noticeably less readily, the settling of the two lines into each other taking quite a few minutes; the first lines show very slight signs of skinning over but it's a very 'soft' skin and easily broken.

In the photo below - apologies, the lines were hastily drawn just to see what happened - the rightmost line running away from the viewer was drawn 5 minutes after the two longer lines running from side to side of the photo had first been laid down and it blended in completely, easily and almost immediately. The two leftmost short intersecting lines were done after 8 minutes and this photo was taken at about 12 minutes. The 8 minute lines have blended in, though not as fully as the 5 minute one.

 

 

Between 15-20 minutes, the pen was refilled (still from the same 5% linseed mix) and new lines added; they will still join but the settling takes another 10-15 minutes or so and thicker areas no longer fully settle down to the wider level.

At 35 minutes, the pen can still be easily reloaded from the original 5% batch (which also still shows no signs of skinning over in the pot, but which has thickened very slightly) and the paint is still perfectly usable in the pen - in fact still a little too thin to avoid occasionally overflowing if care isn't exercised.

Between 45-50 minutes, gaps in the original shapes were filled in and, provided the thickness of the paint was reasonably close to that of the first strips, the earliest and latest lines blended their edges, though they no longer fully settled into the same overall surface.

The photo below was taken at an hour and 7 minutes - again, apologies that the painted areas are a little messsy and the photo angle a little awkward, but hopefully you can see that in the upper painted patch, lines done at various times up to 45 minutes after the first ones have all blended in to the same surface. In the lower patch however, the blending is much less successful because the later lines were added hastily and much too thickly, but what's interesting is that even with 45 minutes between applications the lines do still blend!

@MikeTrice, adding oil doesn't appear to have increased transparency, though I wasn't ready for the quite lowered viscosity and drew far too thickly; I'll be more prepared next time and do thinner lines and coats.

@Jon4470, obviously I can't yet tell whether it will make the satin more glossy, but oddly it seems to me that it has made the gloss ever so slightly less shiny...

 

 

This is way beyond the 2-3 minutes of total workability of the unadulterated paint.

At 5 hours, everything was just about touch dry, though far from hardened; and interestingly, the remaining 5% mix in the plastic pot shows no sign of doing much more then thickening slightly.

Clearly, this works! 🌠🥳

Edited May 2, 2022 by Chas Levin

[Asterix2012]

I wonder if this would assist when brush painting, leaving a smoother finish?

[Jon4470]

And might help me with the black and white gloss...which I find too thick to line with easily?

[Chas Levin]

2 hours ago, Asterix2012 said:

I wonder if this would assist when brush painting, leaving a smoother finish?

I'm absolutely sure it would! I'm not sure if I'm imagining it or not (logic tells me I must be) but it almost seemed as if the paint itself was oiled, as if it moved more smoothly, slid over itself more! And that's only 5% and the only thing that's making me a little nervous of upping the dosage is that even 5% did make it overflow the pen blades, so 10% would presumably increasse that tendency...

But when you're brushing, that doesn't matter, except that you'd need to be a little more careful about drips between pot and workpiece.

But yes, it definitely smoothes and enhances the paint's settling, in the sense of brush marks settling out into a smooth finish.

 

I read a post on the modelshipworld forum about conditioning paint, which is only partly to do with thinning and which can also include adding oil, especially in the case of brushing. There's also quite a lot about avoiding brush marks in the Phoenix Precision book which I'll post about once I've finished both that and the Geoff Haynes book...

[Chas Levin]

3 hours ago, Jon4470 said:

And might help me with the black and white gloss...which I find too thick to line with easily?

I'd go very cautiously doing it for narrow lining Jon, because the oil does make it less viscous and therefore makes the lines spread out a little more, once they're in place.

For what I'm doing at the moment it's not such a problem - in fact it's helping the touching lines amalgamate - but when I do the single narrow green lines alongside the white, to mark the border edge of the green, I'll be using paint straight of of the tin, and the older tin at that.

Ian Rathbone and various others are very keen to stress that paint shouldn't be thinned for use in a pen and that if the paint doesn't flow, it'll almost certainly be the pen that needs adjusting or honing.

Based on recent experiments the other thing I'd ask is, how new or old is the tin of white or black you're using for lining? If you haven't already, I would suggest trying a brand new tin of Humbrol black or white and that might make the ciritcal difference, because none of the solvent or oil content will have evaporated and it'll be a thin and easy-flowing as possible...

 

 

Edited May 2, 2022 by Chas Levin

[Chas Levin]

A quick update 24 hours later: the penned areas (I should have specified that yesterday's linseed oil test was done with the bow pen, not brushed) are definitely fully touch dry, but definitely not fully hardened. I can still make a mark in the paint with my fingernail - I'd have struggled to find a suitable word to describe the state of the paint at a stage like this, but came across an interesting one in reading Bob Shepherd's "The Finishing Touch" (the Phoenix Precision book) where he refers to paint still being 'cheesy'! The specific context is slightly different, but he's basically talking about a similar thing, where the surface is dry but there's still some evaporation of oil and/or solvent and some oxidation taking place from within the paint and I see what he means: pressing down on the thicker areas it does feel like pressing down on hard cheese, where there's certainly some give, but with some slight springiness:

 

 

The wrinkled area is where there was a very thick blob (the oil-diluted paint overflowed a little from the edge of the pen) and it's clearly drying out poorly; it'll be interesting to see what happens with that over the next few days.

 

By comparison, the irregular oval shapes to the left are the satin/dull and gloss I did in the previous tests and they provide a datum point of what completely hardened paint looks and feels like.

 

The other thing I'm even more surprised about is that the residue of 5% oil-diluted paint in the mixing pot is still completely usable, after 24 hours exposed to the open air! It has started to thicken a little, but even so:

 

 

Unfortunately I shan't have a chance to try using it today, but when I mix the next batch, I'll try using some after it's been sitting for a day or so, just to find out how it performs...

[Chas Levin]

After 48 hours sitting in an uncovered pot, the 5% oil diluted mix I made 48 hours ago is starting to thicken up quite a lot, though it's still perfectly usable. You can see in the second photo that it's now sufficiently viscous to leave patches clear if you scrape the bottom of the pot:

 

 

[MikeTrice]

More importantly how does it now react in a ruling pen? Less flooding?

[Chas Levin]

1 hour ago, MikeTrice said:

More importantly how does it now react in a ruling pen? Less flooding?

This one's now too thick / viscous to work in the pen; I tried it a hour or so ago and couldn't get a line going. It certainly sits in the pen, but it took several minutes to work its way down to the blade tips and didn't want to be coaxed out again!

Not surprising really - 48 hours is a long time to sit in the air. I think it would still have worked yesterday after 24 hours, but I didn't have time then to do any more than take a quick photo of it.

The photos of it were more aimed at getting an idea of how long it's taking to dry out and how that relates to drying time when it's been applied as a normal coat: if it's still this liquid after 48 hours, there's clearly still a lot of drying going on.

Likewise, the areas I painted on Monday are still not fully dry. They're more hardended than yesterday but I can still just make a mark with my nail.

 

In the next few days I'll start testing with the satin/dull version and I'll make sure to try that in the pen 24 hours after mixing.

[Chas Levin]

A quick tip for setting the gap between bow pen blades quickly, reliably and repeatably: a feeler gauge!

 

 

I only thought of this recently. I set the pen's wheel so that the blades just grip one of the metal strips but still move along on it easily...

Edited May 4, 2022 by Chas Levin

[Chas Levin]

Before starting in on trying the linseed oil with satin paint, I decided to try one more test with the gloss. Again in an ambient temperature of 20 degrees C, 0.5ml Rustins Raw Linseed Oil was added (by scale-marked pipette) to 5ml PPP P752 gloss GNR Dark Green, a 10% dilution. It renders the paint considerably more runny but, providing only a small amount is used, it will still sit in the pen:

 

 

And when it is applied, it settles, almost immediately, into the most perfect surface - an absolute joy to watch! Here it is after 1 minute:

 

 

However, thin lines and fine detail are not very easy at all - the paint flows out of the pen much faster and more copiously than usual: the patch above was done in seconds, using only four or five touching lines, each of which spread out quite a bit. It's not totally unworkable though - you can see I was able to write '10%' next to the patch for reference purposes.

 

Here's a series of pictures showing the drying at various times, starting with 5 minutes:

 

 

At 12 minutes I added the first side-bar to test how well the two would join:

 

 

At 16 minutes another to the left of the first, and at 25 minutes, another one, further left again:

 

 

 

I also tried drawing some thin lines, now that the paint had gone off a little and as you can see in the photo above, the kind of precision possible with unadulterated paint is very difficult. The tendency to thicker lines at the start and end is much more pronounced, even when great care is taken to start the line with the pen already moving and lift it without slowing down.

 

Here's the state of play an hour and 10 minutes after the first patch had been done and as you can see, the various bars done at different times are settling very well into one surface:

 

 

At an hour and 16 minutes I tired adding a fourth sidebar, the thinnest one, furtherest to the left:

 

 

Only ten minutes later and that fourth line has already blended to a considerable degree:

 

 

Here's how things looked 3 hours after the first patch was applied and the five differently timed applications are settling together, apparently at much the same rate:

 

 

And again, after another 1.5 hours - a total of 4.5 hours after the start of the test:

 

 

Evidently, increasing the added oil from 5% to 10% produces even easier and quicker blending of touching sections and it lengthens the drying time even more, but at the entirely predictable cost of much more runny paint and being able to keep it in the pen isn't much use if it flows out too freely.

I'll give a 7% solution a quick try (how very Sherlock Holmes!) in case that turns out to be the magic mean and balances the slow drying and the viscosity...

Edited May 4, 2022 by Chas Levin

[Chas Levin]

Also yesterday, I had an interesting chat with the chap at Phoenix Paints - I'd called to ask about slow-drying thinners (made for use with varnish, to allow settling into as smooth a finish as possible) and whether they can also be used in paint and he was very helpful. I explained the problem I'm having and he made some interesting points:

 

1. The only reliable and consistently repeatable way to slow enamel drying time significantly is lowering the ambient temperature.
2. Slow-drying varnish thinners can certainly be added to paint, but results may be unpredictable and may vary according to the paint type and colour (in particular the colour and type of pigment).
3. It's highly likely that adding sufficient slow-drying thinners to achieve significantly slower drying would render the paint too runny for use with a bow pen, though brushing with the mixture would probably be Ok.
4. Similarly, letting down with linseed oil could be taken further than 5% if brushed, where increased runniness wouldn't cause the problems it does with a pen (this was before I'd tried the 10% linseed mix in my post of this morning).
5. Linseed Oil and slow-drying thinners can both be added at the same time without causing issues, assuming neither one causes issues on its own (some paints don't like some additives).
6. Cooling the model (I'd suggested mounting it on a stand built on a container for an icepack) or cooling the paint won't achieve the desired aim, because the air you're working in would still be warm (and we agreed that installing air conditioning might be a little extravagant...!)
7. More atmospheric factors than just temperature can affect results (e.g. humidity); what works one day may not work the next - bit of a black art...

Food for thought...

[Chas Levin]

Quick update a few hours on - here's how the 10% mix is doing at 9 hours from the first part being done:

 

 

And at 11 hours:

 

 

As you can see, areas done across a length of time of well over an hour are blending very well.

Needless to say, lengthening the drying time like this is only practical when you don't have a fixed schedule for completing the model.

Another thing that's delaying the process is the weather - it's already so warm during the day that I'm confining my tests to the very early morning, when it's as cool as it's going to get!

Edited May 5, 2022 by Chas Levin

[Asterix2012]

On 04/05/2022 at 11:43, Chas Levin said:

After 48 hours sitting in an uncovered pot, the 5% oil diluted mix I made 48 hours ago is starting to thicken up quite a lot, though it's still perfectly usable. You can see in the second photo that it's now sufficiently viscous to leave patches clear if you scrape the bottom of the pot:

 

 

Would adding more linseed oil at this stage thin it down again?

[Chas Levin]

19 hours ago, Asterix2012 said:

Would adding more linseed oil at this stage thin it down again?

I don't think it would, partly because mixing anything into it evenly or effectively would be very difficult - it's already so thick - but also because once paint starts to dry, the solvent and the oil parts of the carrier evaporate but the paint also starts to oxidise, which changes the nature of it and means you can't 'go back' as it were - it won't become like it was before.

I've been learning a bit about the process, not just from Ian R's book but also from the Phoenix Paints book 'The Finishing Touch'.

This was originally written in 1974 by Bob Shepherd who ran Phoenix at the time and he's since put it through through two further editions, most recently in 2006. It's full of fascinating information about making and using paint, not surprisingly from a technical point of view given that the author was making the stuff!

Amongst the interesting things I've learnt are the following:

• The importance of properly mixing the paint before beginning is stressed enormously, almost more than anything else, including explaining various problems poor mixing can produce whose cause might not be obvious.
• He makes some interesting (and slightly concerning) points about primer, such as that automotive etch primer is only really effeective on aluminium and that automotive grey and red oxide primers are actually intended for ferrous metals. We're using them on brass and nickel silver: hm...
• The point I mentioned in a previous post having discussed with Phoenix's current proporietor about varnish thinners being slow drying thinners  and therefore perhaps of use with paint comes from this book.
• Masking is discussed at length, including adapting the use of masking to the curing times of different types of paint applied in different thicknesses.
• Temperature and drying times: he gives the ideal painting temperature for enamel painting as 15 degrees centigrade, 5 above what Phoenix currently recommends. Not sure what to make of that, except to say that as I currently can just about achieve 15 degrees if I start early enough on a cold morning, so I was pleased to read that!
• I do wonder though whether Phoenix's formulae have changed, because the book also gives drying times as 4 hours touch-dry at 20C, 2 hours at 40C, 50 minutes touch-dry at 60C and 20 minutes touch-dry at 80C (!), times that are of course very different to the few minutes we seem to have at temperatures in the late teens with the current paints. Might this be to do with having had to change the types of thinners, perhaps?
• He recommends always thinning paint to be brushed with 5% thinners.
• Curing time plus oxidation time can take up to 4 weeks, certainly 2 weeks, until fully cured and further hardening takes place after that.
• There's a huge amount of advice about brushing, can spraying and air-brushing techniques, it's really packed in.
• Amongst the can spraying tips, keeping the nozzle at right angles to the model throughout the run (and always starting the spray before going across the model and keeping it spraying until you pass the other edge) was something I realised I've not paid sufficient attention to and the fault he notes will occur if you allow the wrist to pivot at the start and end of each run (differences in the paint film thickness) is something I've had happen quite often: hopefully never again!
• Having given such long touch-drying times, he notes while talking about maintaining a wet edge in brushing, that you should never leave a wet edge for longer than 5 minutes and that in a warm atmosphere even that may be too long.
• Gloss paint has a tougher finish than matt or dull (which Phoenix uses to mean eggshell), which I didn't know.
• Bob Shepherd's advice on lining is quite different to Ian Rathbone's (for instance, curves first and then straights, thin the paint for use in a pen) which goes to show that there's more than one way to skin a cat!
• There's some very interesting information and advice on colour scalling too, how flatting down gloss affects colour and so forth: very interesting!

Highly recommended book, no filler, all meat...

Edited May 6, 2022 by Chas Levin

[Chas Levin]

Here's a quick on the two gloss+linseed oil mixtures from earlier in the week.

First, the 5% linseed oil added to gloss on May 2nd: the residue in the mixing pot has fully skinned over - quite a thick skin - though beneath it is still a thick goo:

 

 

And the penned patches are further hardened, though clearly not fully: I can make a mark with a nail, but it takes some force:

 

 

Meanwhile, the residue of the 10% linseed oil mix from yesterday is still perfectly usable (I'll show it in use in the next post) - the drip in the photo left the stick slowly, but willingly:

 

 

And the section penned yesterday when this mixture was fresh is fully touch-dry but quite a bit less hardened than the 5% one in the previous photos: