Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Deadline disaster in the spraybooth

Broken hairdryer

You probably imagine that I'm in some way good at all this stuff. Projects progress smoothly through all the stages with perfect results every time.

All of this means that I didn't find myself in a cold garage a couple of weeks ago with a paint cup full of a colour that turned out to be gloss, wondering how I was to dry the newly applied paint rapidly running off the item of rolling stock.

This wasn't something helped by the switch on my airbrushing hair dryer breaking. Not the heat switch either, I could have just held the device a bit further from the paint, the on/off/turbo one.

In fact, I bet you didn't realise just how essential a piece of kit this is.

The combination of cold, gloss and an impending deadline for completion of the model didn't make for the best of days. Still, now I have a nice new hairdryer ready to do things the makers won't put on the box, and a model without gloss paint. I wiped all that stuff off with a turpsey cloth.Give me proper matt any day. And a heated garage please...

2 comments:

Paul B. said...

There's probably an untapped market out there - hairdriers for modellers. Although a bit of re-branding might be necessary, 'Superfast Paint Drier for the Discerning Modeller' perhaps?

Huw Griffiths said...

I believe a number of people use hot air guns (effectively hairdryers with attitude), together with paint scrapers, to remove stubborn old paint when decorating.

I'm not sure this is really that far removed from what's being done here.

For some reason, a number of people pretend not to know about stuff like this - can't think why ... ?

(At this point, I should, perhaps, remind people of all the usual Health & Safety disclaimers ... .)


Another use for hot air guns - which lots of engineers and hobbyists will admit to knowing about - is for shrinking heatshrink tubing to size.

Holding a hot soldering iron under this tubing doesn't always cut the mustard - certainly not if somebody's trying to justify extra power tools to play with - sorry to UTILIZE.