TOPIC:

Lee You made a very nice paint work. Same if it is not the real NOS blue but tamiya one

It'll depend on the paint/solvent & the brand of decals, no doubt some combinations will be destructive (so test first), but in general you can lacquer over decals, in fact there can be a case for it - everything will be equally shiny, and it'll help stop dirt getting under the edges.

I've done it a couple of times, but to be honest I prefer the look of shiny paintwork & slightly differently shiny decals, I'm also concerned about what will happen to the lacquer over the decals in the future - will it flake off?

Unless you're going to use a satin or preferably matt lacquer on the main body I wouldn't - shiny Olive Drab just looks wrong to me.

Yup, agreed, I'm still surprised by the shade of blue Tamiya used for the NOS bottle, I'm going to stick with the original instructions though.
Thanks for the feedback on the lacquer, I was thinking of going with TS-80 which is flat. I think I might go from the back of the body, down the side, towards the front with the lacquer and stop where the contour changes, just behind the clover, that should be easy to mask, impossible to see, seal in and even out the new paint and avoid any stickers.
Fingers crossed I don't get myself into anymore bother!

I would say only laquer your willy if that's what it says to do in the Tamiya instructions - it's not what I would personally do, but you've already gone to so much effort to follow the instructions EXACTLY, it seems the wrong thing to do if they don't tell you to...

I'm not a decal fan, & used to spend most of my childhood pulling them off my new toys cos I thought they made the toys look untidy...
Nowadays, if I HAVE to put decals on something, I usually print my own onto waterslide decal paper - it's much thinner, easy to reposition, & stays stuck on tight bends.
I usually use laquer over this type of decal & have never had trouble with laquer flaking off them (...Then again, they are designed to be laquered to waterproof the inkjet ink!).

Only thing to watch with laquer is that you either ONLY use the same brand as the paint OR do some testing on stickers/paint that don't matter first. It's funny stuff & can react with a lot of paints if they don't have exactly the same solvent makeup

Under normal circumstances I wouldn't think of using a lacquer either, the hope is i'll be able to fix my poor airbrush technique/understanding which has left the new paint around the rear wheel arches very powdery compared with the rest if the shell, fingers crossed the flat lacquer will seal and even out the nasty powdery airbrush job.
Already I've learnt such a lot during this project thanks to this forum and the hands-on experience of actually doing it and you can bet I'll do things entirely differently next time around.
Maybe I'll write a new post/thread on my experiences painting this, hopefully it will help out another beginner in the same boat.
Printing decals onto the water application paper is absolute genius! How do you get the background to remain clear and the white areas to actually be white rather than left clear?

Lee wrote:

...How do you get the background to remain clear and the white areas to actually be white rather than left clear?

You mean to replicate white on clear decals, like the numbers on the Willy? You don't, at least not with home technology

Wot Jonny said....

You can't print white, so you have to get cunning.
1) Print decals as usual on clear decal paper, & carefully apply white paint either local to where the "white" decal bit will end up, or on the actual decal itself
2) Print decals on white decal paper, & either cut out the bits that are supposed to show through body colour, OR mess about trying to print a good colour match for the body colour
3) Cut white shapes (eg numbers, letters) directly out of white decal paper
4) Re-do custom decals that don't use white
5) Combination of 1-4 or something else.

I've recently been granted access to one of those robot vinyl cutting machines that "Create & Craft" sell on TV. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like it has potential to be useful against "White" horrors (It has a scan-n-cut feature, that allows it to recognise colour edges & cut around them, ie cut out white bits amongst colour etc)

Jonny wrote:

Tamiya do sell thinners for acyrlics - X-20A Thinner, it comes in 10ml jars or 250ml square plastic bottles. You could also have a go at making your own - the recipe is proprietary, but using it & from the cocktail of smells this is my guess (which keeps evolving BTW):

55% water (discussing what this smells like would be a distraction here )
25% Isopropanol (smells a bit like Ethanol, but different ("faster"?) ... not particularly helpful I know)
10% Methanol (wood alcohol)
5% Ethanol (alcohol alcohol )
5% Butanol (smells like bananas - really!)
trace surfactants (for wetting/levelling)
5% other stuff (because it can't be that easy )

All the different alcohols will be doing different things in there, I'm not a chemist so I couldn't tell you what - my guess would be overall that they balance evaporation rates for a band of working temperatures.

TBH I'd suggest you buy then genuine stuff unless you really want to experiment - but water on it;s own is not going to work properly.

Some time ago I found this which gives, extrapolated from safety data sheets, a recipe of:

Water 54.9175%
(Purified water)
Butan-1-ol 19.9700%
(Secondary Butanol)
Propan-1-ol 14.9775%
(Normal propyl alcohol)
3-methyl-3-methoxy butan-1-ol 9.9850%
(3-methyl-3-methoxy butanol)
Additives - unknown 0.1500%
(Maybe several surfactants)

If we take that as accurate, I was spookily accurate on the water content , less so on the IPA, but after that things obviously went awry with my nose, though the Butan-1-ol (sold as sec-Butanol in the UK, apparently) has an "alcoholic" odour, hence my possible confusion with Ethanol.

Information on the odour of the 3-methyl-3-methoxy butanol (aka 3-methyl-3-methoxy-1-butanol, or MMB) appears to be in short supply, I thought I'd found one source suggestion a banana-like smell (and it being used in the production of "banana oil" flavouring (hence my confusion with basic Butanol?), but lost it in a confusion of far too many web pages open at once.

This MMB appears to be used in a variety of household cleaners/soaps - www.kuraray.eu/...anges/mmb/ with the image of a window being squeegeed may explain why Windex and the like a mooted as alternatives to thinners.


To make 10 litres of pseudo-thinners, I found I could potentially get all the other stuff, plus something suitable to mix it all up in, and bottles to put it in on ebay for less than 110 GBP including shipping - less than half the cost of the "bulk" 250ml Tamiya bottles of thinners, so far anyway.

The MMB is problematic - I could only find one supplier, at 86 GBP per litre I didn't look further, but I would expect that to be plus tax & shipping. In total then I'd be looking at 23 GBP per litre - so about the same as the genuine stuff, for arguably an inferior product.


Just why MMB is in short supply (which is peculiar given its apparent ubiquity in soaps & cleaning products) was hinted at by one result in my search for it, in a PDF entitled something like "Control of Peroxide-producing compounds".
Even my rudimentary knowledge of chemistry suggested _that_ would be a problem, so I did't look any further in case "The Man" was looking. Paranoid? Maybe, but what happened to the guy that was ready to make 125 litres of the stuff in 2001 & never posted again?




Overall then, it's not cost effective to think about making my own Tamiya thinners & I'll buy the genuine stuff, and try to be frugal with it.