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Howdy all,

Having a problem here, and I'm wondering if there are any ideas out there.

I'm using a brand new Grex Tritium.TS
Badger Minitaire Sky Blue, not thinned at all, straight into the cup
PSI is 20

I did run several cup fulls of distilled water through the Airbrush because it was new.

My models came out like this; It looks like there was grease or something on the figs, but they were clean...

Any thoughts?





Thanks much!

v/r
Bill

I have had that happen with some of my miniatire paints before.

Questions;

Did you prime the model?
What did you prime it with?

Try another piece of plastic, to see if you get the same effect.
Try mixing (shaking) the paint very well.

I have not had this problem with the sky blue, but think I did with one two of the other colors, but I think it was either a primer or mixing issue....

The primer was Valejo Surface Primer, in white.

I did get the effect on a test piece of plastic I had, but I thought it might have been because it was un-primed.

I thought I shook it pretty well, I had it on my shaker for about a minute or so... Maybe I need more?

Thanks!

So, Vallejo Surface Primer generally doesn't have a lot of tooth (that is, it's pretty smooth). This means that when you spray on top of it you're going to want your coat to go on a little dry. That means more air to your mix so that it's drying quickly. If the paint goes on too wet on a surface without much tooth it's going to try to bead which is what it looks like is happening there.

So, crank up your pressure a bit and try to do thinner coats. Don't try to do it all in one go.

Ahhhh, ok. Thanks for that.

In my newbie-ignorance, I was dilaing the pressure down a bit thinking it was going on too fast/hard.

I shall certainly try to dial it up tonight.

Thank you!!

v/r
Bill

As soon as I saw it I thought it looked like a primer issue. See how you get on with your experiment tonight. If still no luck, try a different primer maybe.

I was also going to suggest shaking the paint... although the result you have is interesting!

Let us know what you find, as I'm also using a Grex with Minitaire paints and would like to know what caused this.

Ok, I guess I figured this one out. It was bad bottles of paint.

I tried to shoot this at higher PSI, lower PSI and thinned a bit. Shook the heck out of it too. Nothing changed. My test strips all came out the same way, to one degree or another.

I shot a different paint (minitaire lagoon blue this time) and it went on fine. It's not the color I want, but it went on perfectly. 2 images to share here, one is the paint cup where I found a blue mass in the light blue paint. I then poured the bottle out into a tin pan and it was flecked with these dark blue 'chips'





So, I am going to order another pot of this color from a different source and see what happens.

Thanks for the help and good ideas, everyone, I appreciate it!

v/r
Bill

Ah. Yeah, that could be it too.. but it originally sounded like the paint itself wasn't the issue.