Road-Sweeper Day Four

No progress on the road-sweeper today, I'm sad to report. Partly because I've been doing other things and partly because I wanted to read up on different "chipping" techniques. I think I'll probably go with the salt method. Tomorrow looks as though it's going to be a busy and slightly messy day.

My experiment on the cars with acrylic inks didn't work out. The inks were just too thin for use on a non-absorbent surface, and the cars suffered from pooling when I did the second, darker colours:

So, back into the stripping jar they went. Recently I've been watching a few YouTube vids from people who do custom paint jobs on Hotwheels type cars, and a lot of them seem to use Createx paints. I knew that London Graphics Centre sold these, and that they come in opaque, transparent, pearlescent and fluorescent colours (plus, I've since discovered, iridescent ones too). So, this morning I headed into town to get a few to try out.

On the way back home, I thought I'd take a look in the Sainsburys at Harringay. I needed to get some groceries anyway, and there was always a chance I'd find some of the Hotwheels cars I'm looking for. I'd forgotten there was a Poundland next door to it, so I popped in to see if they had any. And boy, did they. Well, not so much the Hotwheels, but they had the motherlode of Corgi Racers - there must have been twenty or thirty of each of the 8 "Grid B" cars. I'd been after a few more of some of them to round out sets so I picked up the ones I wanted. I also picked up a few Hotwheels and some gems/beads in the craft section.

Naturally, I was so taken with my finds and the potential of the Motherlode that I completely forgot to go into Sainsburys!

Anyway, here are the purchases:

All the lootz

Gems and beads - these will do nicely for spikes and mines

The Hotwheels - yes, that is 5 "Pass 'n Gassers" you see there :)

A few Createx paints

The Corgi Racers

The new models

So, three new models - a Corgi GT convertible; a Custom '12 Ford Mustang; and a '83 Chevy Silverado. As the last is a (pick-up) truck, that's two new car models, taking my count to 22 new car models; 2 left on my allowance.

While I was trying to find out exactly what car models the Corgis are meant to be (unsuccessfully, I might add), I discovered that they seem to go on Ebay and Amazon for quite a bit more than the £1 I paid for them - anywhere from £5 to £10 for "mint in pack" (possibly more per car for complete sets). I'm half tempted to go back to that Poundland and buy up all their stock - 200-odd cars at £4 mark-up would be a tasty profit (and would cover the costs of all the cars I've already bought)! The only thing stopping me is the thought of all the admin...

As I haven't used the Createx paints before, I thought it would be a good idea to test them out to see how they flow and what pressure I'd need to use for airbrushing them. Before doing that, I took the two test cars out of the stripper, scrubbed them, rinsed them and let them dry for a couple of hours before giving them a coat of white primer.

My tests with the paints went well, It looks as though they will all run through my Neo (0.3mm needle) at 10-15 psi, although the pearlescent gold did seem a bit "sticky". There were no problems with any of them in my Revolution (0.5mm needle).

Once the testing was done, I sprayed the two test cars with a basecoat of pearlescent gold:

At this point I came to the conclusion that I'd have been better off priming them black - it was hard to see if anything was going onto the cars. I was using the Neo at this point, so some of that might have been due to "sludging" in the nozzle. In a couple of places, I ended up with streaking as a result.

The one problem I have found with the Createx paints is the bottles they come in - the plastic is fairly hard, so it is difficult to squeeze out drops into the airbrush cup. I might need to transfer some into polypropylene dropper bottles for easier handling during sessions.