The Little World

And I know just where it will probably be made…

The lucky people who read this column will have a spray booth to do their airbrushing in. It might be home-made – in which case they can have it any size they like – or a store-bought one that is limited in width and depth. Some of these are perfect for smaller model scales.

But when it grows cold, and wet, and foggy, and the vampires start to howl…the average spray-painting session becomes a misery. We can rug up against the low temperatures but we need to be careful of the cold and damp on the paints. And we need to wait for years while the coats of sealer or paint dry…

Why doesn’t one of the oriental makers turn out a mini-drying tunnel – or box. Car makers who sprayed their cars on an assembly-line basis always used them to dry things between coats. Big banks of lights and infra-red heaters baked the enamels and lacquers as the cars wheeled past.

We would not need such intensity – indeed our plastic models would not stand it – and we don’t need an assembly line drive pulling them in one after another – but wouldn’t it be nice to have a little warm box to speed up the evaporation and cure of paints?

It could be a separate structure or added as part of a spray booth. In this latter case the model would not need to be moved after the paint was down – just sit there in the warm lights.