The Little World

The aerosol spray can…the rattler…has been with us for decades. I remember Pactra and Testors hobby cans in the 1960’s that finally brought the ability for a kid to paint a model car to a realistic finish.

The realism was that of car lacquer colours and as garish as any hot rodder could have desired. There may have been factory-authentic colours available in the same small cans, but I can’t remember anyone ever shooting them. It was metalflake, candy apple, and pearlescent. There was one good car job per can and then a dog-end that tempted you to try to stretch it to try to paint another…but you always ran out. And if you were half-way done, you could be certain that the drug store or hardware store that had the Pactra rack would not have another can of the same colour…

These were high-pressure devices, and the fearsome overspray was death to the rest of your bench and hobby area. No-one had a spray booth with extractor..and no-one had an airbrush or compressor that would have sprayed at lower psi. So we all went down to Safeways or Loblaws and got the biggest empty cardboard they would let us have. Many were the designs for the spray box, but most of them were just variations of cutting the sides in a slope.

We learned the rhythm of spraying and the need for steady passes at a distance. We tried to do it outside where the wind could carry the fumes away, but winter in Canada keeps you inside and the best you could do was a corner of a cold basement. Enamel drying time was forever.

Feather edge camouflage was unknown, as were most masking techniques. Specialist masking tapes were never seen, but most hardware stores sold 3M tapes that could be cut up. The very best that could be done was two-tone if you had a sharp body edge to mask to.

Crude? Rude? Possibly, but not lewd. As teenagers we saved that for other occasions…