Another question to you all. How do you go about accurately measuring paint / thinners. I currently use a small syriegne but find that I go through quite a few as I never seem to get them cleaned thoroughly and go through plenty of thinners in the process. Some paint mixtures ask for 5% of this, 10%of that etc so I was curious as to how others tackle the issue.

Cheers

Hi!

Two tricks that make life a bit easier:

1) You don't have to measure, just count the drops instead. 10+20+70% of some paints make 1+2+7 drops (or 3+6+21 if you need three times the amount of paint and so on...).
2) I use plastic pasteur pipettes. They are cheap so when they get too dirty, I just throw them away. I bought a box with several hundred of them from company specialising in lab consumables ten years ago and I still have a lot left...

Regards

Magnus

A few other tricks:

I got a few small bottles with drop counters in glas from my local pharmacy.

They clean very easily and have a rubber seal which makes that they can even be used to store a paint/solvent mixture for a day.

and then:

with an alcohol marker, normally used to write titles on DVD or CD, I have marked the bottle of my airbrush with horizontal lines and numbers. Some transparent tape avoids that I wash it off again.

I always write down how much paint I prepared for a paint job, and how much was left afterwards. This helps assessing how much paint is needed for a given surface to cover, avoids not having enough paint in the airbrush or making way to much and having to dump it.

I use old fashion glass eye droppers from the local drug store.
Cheap and easy to clean.

Cheers guys. I had previously had the pipette but the bulb split and I never really tried it again.

Hi Chopper,

I don't measure specific quantities of paint to thinner, my rule of thumb is getting the paint the consistency of milk. This balance of opacity to viscosity has always worked well for me. I haven't tried it with high-gloss car finishes, though, just aircraft (gloss and matt) and armour.

I hope this helps!

Graeme.