Tuesday, August 25, 2009

White ?

What has happened to Halfords paint ? You used to get a spray can with a colour coded top that looked like it had been painted with the contents. Now the caps are clear with a paper label stuck on apparently indicating the colour within.

Kadet is white so I selected Peugeot Arctic White as a suitable colour. Painting something as big as a model boat with aerosol is a lot easier than trying to work with an airbrush, the later doesn't really throw out enough paint. In a perfect work I'd use a paint gun but that would need a bigger compressor and more cleaning up than I can, quite frankly, be bothered to do.

Anyway, you would have expected paint called Arctic White to be, well, white. Nice clean white white. The label indicated that was what it would be. At no point did I think pale beige. Not until using the stuff anyway. At that point of course it's too late, you have a pale beige model (I know, try the paint on a test piece etc. - the can said "Artic White" and I wasn't that fussy or so I thought) which doesn't look any better in day light no matter how much you squint at it.

The box lid didn't help either. That showed a gleaming model with no hint of rusty cream colour.

There was only one thing for it - more paint. Back to Halfords for a can of "Appliance White". Washing machines and 'fridges, that's the colour to emulate. The paint is white but also very runny and took a fair bit of fiddling with, heating and generally messing around with to get a nice finish. Good shine though. But if you scrape your dishwasher, go and buy a new one as this stuff would be all but impossible to use on a vertical surface.

And if the Artic is beige, I feel sort for the penquins.

1 comment:

Radical Believer said...

Polar bears in the Arctic, not penguins :)