To elaborate a little on the subject. Knowing all the information and instructions for a spray can will give you more confidence to use it. Remember to invert a can and clear the feed tube and nozzle after use or they will block and you won’t be able to use the rest of the paint.

Some people suggest warming the can in warm water before spraying, the idea is that the paint will flow more easily as the internal pressure is raised. Any spray paint can is a pressurised container and raising that pressure in an uncontrolled way is dangerous. Should you choose to do this you must take responsibility for the consequences.

The distance between the spray can and object being painted is a matter of feel and adjusting for circumstances. If you are too close the paint pools and runs, Halfords paint does contract as it dries but this doesn’t get rid of runs. If you are too far away the paint starts drying before it gets to the subject and you end up with the “orange peel” effect, thus if it’s a hot day you may need to be a little closer to the subject than on a cold day.

When you are building up coats start with several thin “mist” coats. You need to achieve equal coverage all over, not to fill in recessed panel lines or swamp raised details. Once you have a good base level coat then you can start to use “wet” coats. A wet coat is a heavier coat where you can see the “wet look” of the paint. Do not over do these coats, and do not be tempted to take short cuts and go straight to the wet coats.

Please do let the body paint harden off. If you try to handle it too soon you run the risk of pressing fingerprints into the paintwork. I don’t mean just greasy marks but literally fingerprints indented into the paint. These are very hard to get rid of.

Depending on the quality of your paint finish you may be able to go straight to the cutting and polishing of the paint. If you do need to lightly sand the finish before “T” cutting use worn fine grade wet and dry abrasive paper, or a polishing kit, and avoid sanding through any raised areas. If you are going to apply decals do not use any polish on top of the “T” cut. These will repulse the water activated adhesive and stop the decal settling down properly. Polish comes after the decals, but be careful that the polish doesn’t attack the decals.

If you are going to overcoat the decals with any clear coating be sure to test this on some spare decal. Sometimes decals do not take well to clear coats. We have used Halfords Acrylic clear over many decals now, applied in very thin mist coats and this technique of gently coating decals will work for most clear varnish mediums. There are several advantages to covering the decals with clear. Decals often dry out and lift over time, cracking and flaking off. Sealing them down prevents this and helps slow down any discolouration. It also helps hide the carrier film so the decals look more like they are painted on.

Most clear acrylic paints can be treated the same way as pigmented paint and carefully treated with a polishing kit to bring up a high quality shine.

Where we have mentioned “T” cut we should say cutting compound. There are many colour restorers for automotive paints, they all have similar effects though some are stronger than others. They cannot be used with all modelling paints so if you’re not using automotive paint don’t used automotive colour restorers. you'l need a model polishing kit instead.

It is much easier to spray dark colours over light colours than the other way around. You can see on the Matra above that the primer was white followed by coats of gloss appliance white, then the main blue body colour then the darkest colour, the green. This means you have to mask the colour areas you want to protect.

For those of you wondering about airbrushes and acrylic modelling paints please don’t think we are in anyway inferring these are inferior. They are not. At this point we are simply suggesting that the easiest way for a new modeller to achieve a good standard without excessive initial expenditure is by using automotive products.