My paint is too thin?

[Mountain]

I prefer enamel type paint, but I do use paint designed for exterior use on metals etc. I buy with this idea in mind: "If it is not suitable for my models, at least I can use it for other things".
Test the paints on something suitable first.
Some paints comw out in matt and others in gloss. Grey matt undercoats I find useful foe 7mm narrow gauge waggons. Locos and coaches I paint in gloss.
For 00 gauge and smaller, gloss can look a bit too shiny. I have dulled gloss paint on some of my waggons. I did this by repeatedly tapping my fingers on it while it was drying. Yes, I did get rather black painted fingers foe a while, but the effect works. The waggons are made out of wood though.

[stuartp]

The paint currently sold in the UK as "water based, low odour" or similar for painting interior woodwork is latex based. It is harder wearing than stuff sold as 'emulsion' for painting walls, but not nearly as hard wearing as good (?) old fashioned oil-based ozone nasty wash your brushes out in turps gloss.

[Ironduke]

old fashioned oil-based ozone nasty wash your brushes out in turps gloss.

You can still buy oil-based paints though? In many ways I think washing your brushes in turpentine is better for the environment, as long as you don't pour your old turps down the sink, but I'm not aware of any issues with ozone. Done properly you can keep a jar of turpentine going for many washes before you have to replace it.

That said, I mainly use acrylic these days. Mainly Vallejo, but I'm not trying to match any British railway colours.

[stuartp]

Yes you can still buy oil based paints, they haven't banned them yet. I much prefer enamels (oil) but the smell doesn't go down well with the other residents of the house so I tend to use acrylics these days. The ozone nasty bit was a joke.

The OP isn't the first to make this sort of mistake, I once used Tamyia Flat Base on a model Chinook I'd spent weeks building, I used it as the final matt coat after the decals were on and just thinned it 50/50 with water and a little bit of thinners just like every other matt acrylic varnish I've used. But it's not a matt varnish, it's a flatting agent. The Chinnok looked like it had been left out in a particularly hard frost.

[ChrisGreaves]

Done properly you can keep a jar of turpentine going for many washes before you have to replace it.

Serious question: A well-used jar of turps-rinse would start to behave as a weathering fluid, would it not? The stuff in my six bottles (top of this thread) seems to me to be little more than "coloured mineral turpentine".
Thanks
Chris

[captrees]

Done properly you can keep a jar of turpentine going for many washes before you have to replace it.

Serious question: A well-used jar of turps-rinse would start to behave as a weathering fluid, would it not? The stuff in my six bottles (top of this thread) seems to me to be little more than "coloured mineral turpentine".
Thanks
Chris

Yes.

Some experimentation required to get it right, and you'd need to make sure that it didn't come out all shiny. The same would apply to very watered down acrylic paint.

FWIW here are the paints you inquired about that I use... Pot Belly Black Stove Paint and Dulux paint samplers.



The sample pots are household acrylic and easy to use. They can be watered down to water colour consistency if you want. Generally they are a sort of mid gloss finish which decreases as you thin it. $7Aus at the local hardware shop for 250ml and they mix it to any colour on their colour charts. Very convenient and cheap. It goes a very long way, and of course you can mix colours. Probably not ideal if you want to paint really shiny locos, and it sometimes doesn't stick to glossy surfaces very well.

The Pot Belly Stove paint is brilliant for anything black. I first bought it years ago to restore a rusty stove. (A different brand from illustrated) Paint it on and its like water, but soaks into, and kills rust. I've used it on motorcycle parts, a roo bar, and now painting locos. It has a matt finish and goes on like water colour. It thins with turps, and sticks to gloss stuff. I've even painted over chrome with it.

[ChrisGreaves]

Some experimentation required to get it right, and you'd need to make sure that it didn't come out all shiny. The same would apply to very watered down acrylic paint.

Thank you captrees. I am unlikely to experiment with weathering agents, being the owner of record-breaking quantities of the commercial stuff here on the tip of the peninsula, but your further comments on regular paint stocks have encouraged me to lug in all the other cans from the shed.
The local solution to most problems here is to "run it out to the tip" (5Km south of town), to which I respond "No, let's put it in my shed", which is how I come to own a variety of paints.

The sample pots are household acrylic and easy to use.

I shall head on down the hill to the local Paint Store and get an education this morning. And from now on I shall store a sample of every household paint I come across in a cleaned empty herbs/spices jar, 1/2-cup capacity, ready for immediate use. Along with an example of use on a piece of plastic off-cut.
Cheers
Chris