Help!!!

[BornToBattle]

Ugh. I’m working on my Tamiya 1/12 Brabham F1 model right now and I use Tamiya lacquer paints. All parts are probably 90% done by airbrushing. Now for the HELP!!! part…

 

After masking off, I shot semi-gloss black next to a gloss white finish (just gloss white, no clear coating). Unfortunately my masking job failed in some very small areas so my question is - I’m thinking of taking a very light, quick swipe with one of two items I’ve got at hand - mineral spirits or 91% isopropyl alcohol. Question is, which one will be effective at removing the overspray with minimal effect to the existing white paint underneath? I could see this quickly becoming a nightmare with wet sanding involved if it fails along with having to re-airbrush.

 

Some photos to help explain here too! Thanks in advance!

[Feathered_IV]

Eek!  I would not use either.  If you’re taking off the black overspray, you’ll also take off the white. Could you polish off the overspray by making yourself a simple polishing block and giving it a rub with a mild polishing compound?  Even toothpaste might do it. 

[ZachariasX]

I agree with Feathered, I would not use solvents in such a case. I am correcting a lot of overspray and color leaking when building models with the kids.

 

In my experience, if you are successful getting the overspray off with a solvent, you attack the lower layer as well. It not just damages that one, leaving visible traces in the finish, it might also mix the solved colors again making an even worse mess. It all depends on kind of paint and how long each paint layer could cure.

 

What to do depends IMHO entirely on the total finish standard of your model you want to achieve and the time to repair you want to invest.

 

For such mishaps, I usually take a wet 1000+ sandpaper and see how readily I can remove the fresh top coat. If there are many different such oversprays, I overpaint the polished location with a couple of fine layers with the brush, and polish.

 

For shiny full budy work, as in your case, I‘d polish (or sandpaper) the overspray off and use the airbrush to make a new layer of paint in the damaged location and once that is nice again, then another layer for the full body to make the color uniform.

 

With car bodies like these, I always, always, spray the inside first. Overspray like this is bound to happen as the shrink of drying paint strains the masking tape. The more masking tape you use, the more it will contract, creating all these little openings where color enters. It is difficult to do a good masking job with the bare minimum of tape used.

 

If you make the black inside first and then mask the inside for the white outside, any overspray you have will be super easy to correct, because black covers white readily and because the location of the accident is not visible, all you need to do is just take a paintbrush and some black and in less than a minute you suitably corrected five locations of overspray.

 

If building with kids taught me one thing, then it is the paramout importance of being organized. Doing all steps in the right succession speeds up things more than anything else. And it does so because it makes inevitable mishaps manageable. What that means in detail depends on your specific project but in general it is along the lines „inside before outside“ and „light color before dark color“. Things like that.

[VBF-12_Stick-95]

Once it's finished please put up a picture of it.  Love to see it.