The good old days.

One of my wishes came tru this weekend. I went storage room spelunking over the weekend and found a missing box of paints that went AWOL a few years ago during a mis-move. Of course it was more a case of the paints found me - I was looking for something else at the time. While I had replaced a lot of the bottles it was still a nice feeling to "unfoul" something of my own making. Solvent and paint were AOK on the ones I checked.

Thank God for life's little pleasures - the big ones just don't seem to roll in as frequently.

WmB

willshak wrote: (snip)

My step back in time came a couple weeks ago at MosquitoCON. A vendor had a box of perhaps 200 bottles of Floquil - the good stuff from their Military Line... for $1 apiece. I bought 31 bottles (musta been thinking Baskin-Robbins) and should have bought the whole box...

Frank Kranick

Especially for the Pactra paints. I've missed them ever since Testors got hold of the company. #@!%^&*+!!!

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

Nope- you didn't figure in inflation. Suppose you were working for two bucks an hour!

I did a spreadsheet for inflation using data from a government CPI site. I then looked at my old hobby mags from the forties and fifties. There are still kits very much in line with inflation compared to these years. What has happened is a broadening of the price range. There are still kits just in line with inflation, but more deluxe kits with lots more detail, and these kits are more expensive.

Paints have indeed exceeded inflation. I used to pay a DIME for those small bottles. At 10X inflation they should cost a buck today. They cost nearly twice that. But at least the kits are in line with inflation.

i'm nursing 8 last bottles...you already know about my humbrol rlm. that equivalent chart that was posted helped, but i want my freakin" RLM!!!!!! i hate acrylics, and i learned how to use humbrol enamels well. damn unfair universe, bitch, grumble.

that's why i learned to revive old paint. to paraphrase everett dirkson, a bottle here and a bottle there, next thing you know, you're talking some real money.

Do you have any suggestions for reviving old paint? I'm loathe to throw out some of these bottles if there is a slight chance that they could be saved. Most have enough pigment to paint a couple of models if they can be resurrected into some liquid form. The Polly-Ss say to thin only with water. I put some water in one of the dry caked ones and overnight, there was no change. I wonder what that syrupy stuff was in the Polly-S bottles. In those, I was able to mix the syrup and pigment into a thickish liquid (Too thick to paint with. Needs more syrup). When I get to some hobby shop, I'll see if they have any acrylic thinner, the stuff that is used to thin paint for airbrushing. Perhaps they are too far gone. What about the Pactra enamels? Regular enamel thinner? I don't have any enamel thinner around, so I would like to know before I go out and buy some.

i haven't worked with acrylics. if you want to send me a bottle to experiment on, i'll do it. for enamels, you need LAQUER thinner. take a piece of metal and stir up the dry stuff as finely as you can. i personally get it all out of the container and then grind it in a mortar and pestle. you want the dried stuff to be as fine as you can grind. replace in the original container and add some laquer thinner. cover the stuff to fill the container about 3/4 full. if you are working with very little powder, use less thinner. let it sit for a few days. then take an electric jig saw, tape the container to the blade, use something to hold the trigger down and shake it for a while. not crazy fast, just the same as as regular paint shaker. give it 20 minutes to

1/2 hour. let it settle and see how pasty it is. repeat the settling/shaking until it's paint again. i've done this on humbrol tins and pactra bottles. ymmv.

That makes two of us! When I heard about the Testors buy out I hustled around to the one Hobby shop in the area that handled Pactra's little bottles and bought out all the glass he had left. The plastic bottles did not hold up but the glass bottles I bought are still viable. I'm building a couple of Hasegawa Battle of Britain Hurricanes right now and the paint I'm using is Pactra.

Bill Shuey

FWIW Part of the cost of paints can be laid at the door of the environmental lobby. I remember when they pulled all the little 6 packs of Humbrol off the market because of their lead content. Then there was the ruckus over Flo Quil's model railroad paints containing a "hot" solvent that was thought dangerous by some. Look at California's environmental laws! What is sold in California's hobby shops??

Bill Shuey

Thanks for the suggestion. I will try this on an old bottle tonight.

Bill Shuey

anytime

What did Testor's do to the Pactra line? Didn't they just rebadge the Pactra formula? I liked Pactra because the bottle neck had the same width as the Badger airbush, and the bottle could be screwed directly onto the airbrush without dirtying up the airbrush bottle.

Lacquer thinner for plastic model paint? Lacquer will eat plastic. DAMHIK.

i had a spare badger so i glued a bottle cap with a hole to the big round lid so i could use paint strait.

Testors, or properly RPM Industries, bought out the Pactra outfit and then discontinued all the Pactra 'Namel colours. The Pactra name survives on paint for R/C Cars and, IIRC, paint for flying models. At one time here Testors paints were only available in places like Kresge's and Woolworth's. All the local hobby shops carried the Pactra line. I got started with Pactra when I discovered that for 5¢ more I could buy a bottle seemingly twice as large of better paint. I was particularly attracted to Hot Rod Primer for the cars and for the 'rubber' tires on airplanes. One could buy a big bottle of thinner for a reasonable amount. Testors had nothing to compete. They sell thinner now in bottles that hold a half of what Pactra's bottles did and they charge the same price as the big bottles went for. Then there was the Pactra liquid glue. It didn't make me sick to my stomach like Testors does to this day and worked much better. I'm still too used to glue that allows a little working time. Nothing I have today works that way.

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

I didn't get that lucky. By the time Testors bought them up there was only one store that handled it and the owner got them for me especially. OTOH, I did buy up all the bottles left in the International Series. I'm not sure what to do with all that 'Suntan' that was in the group but I'll find something to use it on.

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

I recall a story in "Time" back in the Nixon years. At one point the government imposed price controls and Testors raised their prices unduly. One little boy complained to the agency in charge of administering the rules. ISTR that he won. Anyone else remember this?

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.