Tips and Tricks for Making Model Railroad Paint Last
MRA EditorsFew would call model railroading an inexpensive hobby. With all the supplies necessary for building the most realistic models, costs can add up pretty quickly, so it’s important to try to make your materials last as long as possible. This is especially true for model railroad paint, which is vital for adding customization and personalization to your layouts. We like to utilize simple tips and tricks to get those few extra miles out of our model railroad paint, and in this lesson we’re going to share with you some of our favorites.
Taking care of your model railroad paint
To help you get the most bang for your buck and maximize each model railroad paint you have in your arsenal, NMRA Master Modeler Gerry Leone introduces eight expert techniques for saving and best utilizing model railroad paint.
Gerry begins by discussing some inexpensive preservation methods for extending the shelf life of your model railroad paint, including a few smart storage methods. He teaches you a quick little trick for using snack wrappers to make your paint bottles more airtight, and then demonstrates the best way to replace bottles into your storage cabinet when you’ve finished using them. Model railroad paint should last up to 15 years when stored correctly; that is, unless you use it before then.
Ask any modeler—one of the worst things when it comes to model railroading is wasting, so the experts try to do everything they can to avoid waste at all cost. That’s why Gerry recommends two or three simple shortcuts for using as little model railroad paint as possible and keeping the rest in the bottle. You’ll learn how to cut a drip funnel out of a small bottle and utilize plastic caps for mixing, and then Gerry teaches you how to create a mixing card that you can use to remember formulas and spend less time trying to find the right shade. With these and more of Gerry’s expert tricks for saving model railroad paint, you’ll get the most out of every bottle you buy!
If you're a model railroader you're no stranger to paint and I've got eight tips for you here that will not only save you some paint they'll save you some money. The first tip is storage. There are plastic papers inside a fruit roll-ups and other candy like this that you may enjoy, your kids may enjoy, your grandkids may enjoy. Inside of this, you'll find some plastic paper that breaks easily and is perfect for storing your paint. The big advantage of this is the paint won't adhere to this paper, and so it's always easy to open up the jar, plus it'll keep it relatively air tight.
However, if you're gonna be storing paint for a long period of time, what you'll wanna do is store the paint upside down. Storing the paint upside down keeps the air from getting into the cup. It'll harden around the perimeter of the lid and you can keep paint for 10 or 15 years, as long as you keep it in a nice climate controlled environment. Mixing paint is easy when you use something like these disposable bottle tops. They come in obviously all different sizes depending upon what you're drinking, and it's great to be able to put a few drops of paint, of varying paints into these things and just mix them up.
If you've got an airbrush with cup on it it's easy enough to just make one cup full of paint and pour that in there. But these are pieces that you'd normally throw away or recycle anyway, so why not use them for mixing paint? Speaking of mixing paint, a lot of modelers will shake their paint to distribute the pigment inside of the solvent. But actually the best way to do it is to use a battery run Paint Mixer. This happens to be a model by Badger but they're sold by other companies as well.
These run between 10 and $15. And the big advantage here is within 15 seconds, you can distribute that pigment very evenly throughout the the paint and it does a much better job of distributing the the pigment in the paint than simply shaking the paint does. The downside of this, is that you'll always wind up with a drip or two of paint down on the mixing blade down there. And to try to get that off your impulse is to push the trigger and you'll wind up by splattering paint all over your work bench. So to solve that, you can build a little collar out of a small juice bottle or even a spice bottle will work but something that will fit over the lip of your paint bottle so that you can get it in there, mix it up, bring your mixer out a little bit, and again, the collar picks up all of the excess paint that will tend to fly off.
Now you're working at your work bench with your paint. And of course, air is that the big enemy of paint. Air wants to dry paint and the worst thing you can do is be painting a model and leave that paint open a lot, especially if you're going on to some other task and then coming back. So if you've got an old mouse, an old computer mouse at home that you're not using, pop the mouse ball out of it, pop that on the top of the paint jar, and that will seal off the paint jar temporarily while you're doing your other tasks, and it's easy enough to just toss this aside, get your paint and put it back on there to make sure that the paint is sealed. When you're doing a lot of paint mixing it's a pretty smart idea to have a mixing card.
This is a piece of heavy styrene and what I've got on this thing, It just shows the various colors that you can buy already premixed, but it shows what they look like on white, so you get a good idea of what the real color is. If you're doing some custom mixes, you can put those on this card as well. Put the formulas on here, and next time you're trying to match a flesh color or a certain blue color, you've got the formula on there and you've got exactly what that paint looks like on white. The last tip, if your work bench is nowhere near a sink, as mine is not, there is a product called a Rinse Well. And what this is, is a plastic jar of water in a little reservoir down here.
When you're done painting, it's easy enough to just dunk your brush in there to get the excess paint off of it. And then this button will flush the paint down into the bottom of the Rinse Well. And then as you can hear it filling up here, more water will fill up in the reservoir and you're constantly having clean water at your work bench. Those are eight paint tips that'll save you some time, save you some money and save you some paint.
Really good tips, except that I haven't seen a non-optical mouse in several years! Guess I'll have to find something to substitute for that tip.
Great advice/instructions as always. Is there a product I can buy besides the inside of wrappers for the paint jars to be covered to keep them from hardening and drying out? Thank you and keep the advice/instructions coming. We all benefit from the knowledge.
I have found fruit snack cups to be usefull when dealing with model paints. First is to cut a hole slightly smaller than the circumference of the bottle and making short cuts around the hole. This allows me to invert the cup and slide it down over the bottle which prevents it from being it tipped over and spilling the paint. They make good mixxing bowls for paint and glues.
How do you come with some of these ideas,I find all of your videos very interesting and helpful.
All very good ideas. Thank you.