How to get a deep clear shiny paint shifinsh?

First, weldome to the forum Aaron. Glad to have you with us.

Your paint combination should work fine. Tamiya acrylic is great paint and should give you a good finish to work with. Once it is complete and has cured for a couple of days, I'd recommend a good coat of gloss finish. There are a lot of posts here about gloss finishes, but since most (but not all!) of the gloss coats are laquers you need to be certain that your acrylic paint has completely cured before using them or they can dissolve the acrylic.

An alternative is an acrylic gloss coat. Future floor polish works well, but I usually wind up with a pebbly finish instead of a high gloss finish. Since most of what I build has a flat or "Semi-Gloss" finish that works OK for me. From posts I've read here the way to fix that is to keep spraying thin coats of Future and let them dry. After 5 or 6 coats the pebbling will go away.

I think Poly Scale makes some acrylic gloss coat as well. Testors, I believe, is laquer. There are some guys here far more familiar with them than I am who will chime in and get you pointed in the right direction.

Regardless of what you use, paint a piece of scrap sheet stryrene the same as your model and play with that until you get the finish that you want. It's a lot safer to work out problems on a piece of scrap than a finished model.

Thanks Scott,
I see you mention "Future" floor polish? Thats what it sounds like it is? I will look for some today. Again thanks for the tips and I finally found a place where I can go to get some answers to my many questions.

Aaron Donovan
Garrett, IN.

QUOTE: I see you mention "Future" floor polish? Thats what it sounds like it is? I will look for some today.

Future is exactly what you think it is. It's the common floor polish that you can find at just about any grocery or department store.

Basically just spray it on straight out of the bottle. It is pure acrylic and will form a coat of plastic around your paint. Here is a great link on Swanny's web site about all the in's and out's of using it:
http://www.swannysmodels.com/TheCompleteFuture.html

QUOTE: Again thanks for the tips and I finally found a place where I can go to get some answers to my many questions.

There are already thousands of answers to questions here, but if you can't find one feel free to ask and someone will help you out. This forum has a great bunch of people and the level of experience is amazing. If these guys can't answer your question you didn't need to ask it

I use Future on a lot of my airbrushing projects, and it works well for my needs but I generally don't need (or want) the ultimate in gloss. Has anybody really gotten a truly deep, "wet-look" shine using future? The level of shine I'm talking about is like on par with a good show car or custom painted tank on a high-end motorcycle.

Aaron,

Check out this link "How to Lay Down the Perfect Paint Job":

[code]http://www.briansmodelcars.com/tutorials/tutorial.asp?TutorialID=12&CurPage=1[/code]
HTH.

-Dan

QUOTE: Originally posted by danok2 Aaron, Check out this link "How to Lay Down the Perfect Paint Job": [code]http://www.briansmodelcars.com/tutorials/tutorial.asp?TutorialID=12&CurPage=1[/code] HTH. -Dan

Good advice in this article. It's basically the same procedure one would use on a full size show car. Color sanding, polishing.

I've shot some of the clear coats that are used in auto body applications, and although one gets the ultimate, deep shine with the whole wet-sanding / final polishing technique, even if one doesn't wet-sand/polish, you still get a pretty darn good shine anyway. Look at any car that comes off a major assembly line (BMW, Audi, even Chevy) - none of those cars are wet-sanded and polished. They all have what is called a "gun finish" - that's that shine that sprayed on clear coat will leave all by itself - and yet it's still high quality. As much as I like Future for my needs, there's no way I can convince myself that it will produce that sort of shine, except, maybe, via the wet-sand/polish route.