The Little World

Some people outside of Australia may not know the Wagner spray guns and rollers. They are devices sold in DIY shops that are intended to make house painting easier. The TITANIC was a boat intended to make ocean travel safe…

Wagners do work. I painted the inside of a house with one about 40 years ago. My psychiatrist says the shaking and nightmares should stop pretty soon. In retrospect my idea of tossing a Mills bomb into a tin of paint in each room and accepting the results without making a fuss would seem to have been a better idea than the Wagner. It was a system that pressurized a commercial tin of house paint and fed it up a tube to a roller.

Various attachments allowed you to paint ceilings and walls without continually dipping a roller into a tray. No-one mentioned that you would be hefting 2 x the weight using this idea vs the regular way, nor that you would be spending an hour trying to clean the machine after use. No machine was ever cleaned effectively, and the only way to get a job done completely was to roller continuously until you fell lifeless from the ladder – then throw the machine in the bin.

Later models of Wagner featured self-powered spray guns with a paint pattern that was too wide, too narrow, and too much trouble to thin out. You could paint fences with them if you did not care whether anything looked good.

Well, that was the full-sized world – in the Little World I wondered if the new airport buildings would be amenable to spraying as well – and I think I can report success. The three new Wet Dog Regional airport buildings are all big enough to make brush painting on a warm day problematical – even with retarder. Time to break out the thinner and whatever bottles of paint could be combined cheaply.

The masking of windows was not as tough as it might have been – the ones that could be left out of the aperture meant that no particular precision was needed. Others could be masked with blocks of foam plastic and masking tape. It’s hard to exactly predict the average amount of paint for a building as they are bigger than aircraft, but I managed with only one additional mix needed. Spraying a building is dead simple as you just keep rotating it on the turntable until it is done

And, unlike Wagner guns, Mr. Hobby airbrushes can be cleaned in 5 minutes.