The Little World

The closer you get to TNT.

I was drawn to this conclusion by a painting disaster. I’d masked over AK lacquer paint with the GSI Creos firm’s Mr Masking Neo solution – the light blue rubber solution that remains elastic after it dries. The material came in an attractive bottle with a brush and I thought it might be good for British A/B camouflage.

It went on pretty well, though the viscosity of the material made it hard to steer into tight patterns. It looked a little chunky on the surface. I thought it had dried pretty well in the warm box…

The pattern was a dark green over dark grey. The dark green looked fine, as the last coat, but the dark grey under the Mr Masking was ruined – dark swirls of oily goo on the grey. A broken paint surface. I had no alternative to stripping the entire two colours off the upper surface of the airplane  – so I stripped. The result was like a heavy-handed panel job, but the integrity of the Mr Surfacer Primer and surfacer was still perfect. I am impressed  with that, even in the face of disappointment.

So what did it? Not enough curing time for the dark grey? Or a chemical cocktail in the Mr Masking Neo that penetrated it? I am generally pretty happy with the surface integrity of lacquer-based paints once they are cured, so I suspect the masking agent. Fortunately it was not too expensive; if it proves to be the culprit I can afford to ditch it. Still, I have rarely had a bad product from GSI Creos so I’m going to conduct a series of tests with it to see if it can be tamed.

In the meantime it is sticky tape and Tuff Tac

PS: The AK paint sprays well.