OK Geezers I know some of you can relate.

Don Stauffer

 

 

Tanker - Builder

Hi;

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 The funny thing ? You can keep enamel for years.Why does Acrylic dry in the bottle even if you NEVER use it? I never had Lacquer or Enamel do that !

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I have never had an unopened bottle of Testors enamel that old, but what I have noticed is that once a bottle is unopened, it does degrade somewhat fast. It reaches a point where it cannot be restored by stirring or shaking- it seems to polymerize, and become unusable.  I still like Testors enamel, and still use it but I know once I start using a bottle it will not last that long.

 

Hey that jig saw jig is pretty cool!

Yeah Johnny! A helluva machine!

The main reason That I made the "super shaker" is because I could never get Testors' Aluminum paint to properly mix. The paint always had those weird black streaks in it. The super shaker does a great job of mixing the paint.

Johnny, I made one of those. It works great, especially if you put a bee bee in the bottle.

Here are some paints I still have. The Polly s are from the 70's. I haven't and won't open them since.

I know that in 1972 Testors' enamels cost 15 Canadian cents a bottle, and even our small corner store sold them.

Talk about prices, I just dug out from the stash an old 3-in-1 AMT car model kit that has a price tag of $1.49 on it. You can't even ship one for that now.

This goes back to 1977 and yes it was .40 cents for the testors at K mart. The Pactra was  only at orange blossom the local hobby shop at the time

I threw out several bottles that had the dime price on the lid a couple of years ago. They were basically empty in old kit boxes from my youth.

Let's go back 54 years..... 

A 50 cent 1/72 scale made in Revelle P-39 Airacobra assembled with tube glue and hand/brush painted with 10¢ testor enamels. Bought it all at the local drug store. For a dumb kid with limited resources/info and no help other than the kit instructions, this was the best I could do. Spent my allowance every week on a new kit.

I built this antique back in 1965 and it still looks pretty good. It's never been broken and sits properly right out of the box.

Less than a dollar all together and even has (for that time) a fairly reasonable representation of the mid-fuselage allison engine. Wish I still had the box it came in.

Wow.  Outstanding pictures.  Thank you for posting the link.

Got these survivors 

And these form the early to mid 1970's. For the older South Florida/Miami  guys around in the hobby way back when, check out the Orange Blossom Hobby price tag.

Those 19 and 25 survivors like the ones I posted have to be early 60's, very late 50's at the most. Mmmm we all had to have a gold and silver no matter we needed them or not!

In 2015 I was packing up the old family home, and I found an old box that had my enamels - Humbrol mostly - and some of my old modelling equipment from the 70s. I had no idea that Dad still had them. They were all solid lumps of dry paint by then, but it was still nice to see them again.

I also found a 38 year-old can of Badger Propel that was seriously corroded, and probably posed some kind of safety hazard. 

Those old paints I posted are still good, some being 40+ years old yet a newly purchased small Testors paint bottle or MM Enamel has gone bad in just a couple of months. Quality has gone down hill IMO. 

Last night, I was looking for just a bit of primer to use on a 1/72 P-51B I'm building for a friend and picked up one of the old pactra bottles of "Flat Rebel Gray No M12". It looked like 75% solid and 25% thinner. Never been opened. It took an oil filter wrench and a pair of pliers to get it open. Stuck a toothpick in to see if it was hard as a rock. To my surprise, the toothpick went clear to the bottom. Put the old battery powered mixer in and stirred away. It mixed right up, went on nice and smooth with my Iwata, and this morning it was dry and looks great.

Hope the rest of those old paints I have turn out that well. They don't make them like that any more.

Jim  

fox

Last night, I was looking for just a bit of primer to use on a 1/72 P-51B I'm building for a friend and picked up one of the old pactra bottles of "Flat Rebel Gray No M12". It looked like 75% solid and 25% thinner. Never been opened. It took an oil filter wrench and a pair of pliers to get it open. Stuck a toothpick in to see if it was hard as a rock. To my surprise, the toothpick went clear to the bottom. Put the old battery powered mixer in and stirred away. It mixed right up, went on nice and smooth with my Iwata, and this morning it was dry and looks great.

Hope the rest of those old paints I have turn out that well. They don't make them like that any more.

Jim  

 

Same experience here. When I was at Ubon RTAFB in the early seventies I bought some Pactra paints at the base hobby shop to paint an F-4 model. Pactra had colors that were a perfect match for SEA camouflage, even though they weren’t labeled as such. (It was an easy bit of research to verify the color accuracy. All I had to do was paint the model, then hold it up against an F-4 that had a fresh repaint.) I somehow kept the paints for decades. A few years ago for one of the pilots who had flown out of Ubon I built an F-4 model in his markings. I dug out the Pactras, added a little thinner, stirred them up and airbrushed them right on.

Definitely something better about those old paints. Probably lead, or something else equally politically incorrect. Or maybe just better quality control.

I think when I saw those testor paints with the prices on them I still thought buying clear would make parts see-through...lol.  I still have some - the chrome silver was the best I've used for brush painting.

fox

Last night, I was looking for just a bit of primer to use on a 1/72 P-51B I'm building for a friend and picked up one of the old pactra bottles of "Flat Rebel Gray No M12". It looked like 75% solid and 25% thinner. Never been opened. It took an oil filter wrench and a pair of pliers to get it open. Stuck a toothpick in to see if it was hard as a rock. To my surprise, the toothpick went clear to the bottom. Put the old battery powered mixer in and stirred away. It mixed right up, went on nice and smooth with my Iwata, and this morning it was dry and looks great.

Hope the rest of those old paints I have turn out that well. They don't make them like that any more.

Jim  

 

Not only did it work fox but it's better quality paint.

I have used the new Testors gloss paints and had to wait over a week for it to cure before polishing the paint otherwise it would come off to the primer or bare plastic a day or two later. I just used my 40+ year old Copper Testors enamel paint to touch up my 1980 Butternut (also called copper tone) color Schwinn Suburban bike  and was able to lightly polish out the touch ups within a couple of hours without removing all the paint! I will still let it sit for a couple of days and lightly re polish again.

Hi;

 I believe it was a combination of things. Pride in the product, Pride in the company name and Pride to be able make this product available to the public. All in all, Pride in one's name in the public's eye.

     true ,this does come down to a lot of things and yes, Quality and Quality Control , After all, look at the products we have purchased over the years. How many of a particular product do we have? It all boils down to faith in the product and it's useability.

      You could be that way back then.That's why after the Little Bottles, when Testors created Model Master it was my go to after Humbrol and Polly S. The Testors was always in my supplies and I wish their Acrylics met the challenge. In my opinion they don't even come close!

      Pactra will always be a old favorite of mine .I painted so many cars and none look brushed and they still look good today.