Best Ratio for Thinning Tamiya Paint

Apologies. If you’re referring to Mr Leveling Thinner, yes, that has a much more noxious odour than Tamiya thinners, which are comparatively inoffensive.

Sorry for the miscommunication on my end, Mathew. I meant ask if the Klean-Strip lacquer had the same or more stronger odor than the Tamiya thinner.

Brian

That was the other Matthew. :slightly_smiling_face:
It sounds like it though… Anything called lacquer thinner is I think generally an aggressive solvent, which seems like it is confirmed by the “Klean-Strip” name it has. In the UK this type of product is labelled Cellulose Thinners and you should wear a vapour mask when spraying it and only use it at all with good ventilation. This kind of product can potentially also affect styrene.

Comparison to Tamiya thinners, it depends if you mean the normal Tamiya X-20 thinners which is comparatively benign alcohol based, or their lacquer thinner.

Okay, the other Matthew here. The Klean-Strip lacquer thinner is about the same level of smelliness as the Tamiya lacquer thinner. All lacquer thinners are very evaporative and vaporous, so you will get that smell no matter what brand you buy. I have also bought “Sunnyside” and “Rustoleum” lacquer thinner and it smelled different, but not less.

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FWIW - Seems most modern lacquer thinners readily available at home improvement and hardware stores tend to use a lot of Acetone. That’s needed to comply with low VOC rules in most countries. So likewise the amounts of toluene, xylene, methyl ethyl ketone and so forth from the old days are much reduced or replaced with less environmentally substances for what’s easily available.

The newer lacquer thinners strike my nose as still stinky but not the same variation of intensely stinky as the prior formulations.

Just read this thread as I too am trying to figure out the painting magic in our hobby. So, from what I’m understand here is that some of you guys mix acrylic paints with lacquer thinner to get your desire finish. How is that possibly? I though the properties are completely different and non compatible in these elements.

I need to search this out more as with what I have learned and applied successfully is using the name brand paint with same brand thinner; ie, acrylic paint w/ acrylic thinner etc.

Hi, the confusing thing is that the term “acrylic” paint includes types of paint that are actually not the same and not compatible with each other.
To my knowledge, you can mix lacquer thinner / Mr Leveling Thinner / cellulose thinners, with paints such as AK Real Colors, Mr Color, Mr Surfacer, Hataka Orange range (those are lacquer paints) as well as Mr Hobby (“Aqueous”), Tamiya (those are alcohol based). Although these paints are not identical in composition, they do all use carriers other than pure water. You cannot (again, to my knowledge) use lacquer thinners with purely water based acrylic paints such as Vallejo (Model Air, Panzer Aces, etc.), Ammo, AK in the 17ml squeezy bottles, Hataka Red range. In my experience (I got confused over what was red and what was orange on the label of a Hataka set) adding lacquer thinner to pure water based acrylics produces a curdled paint cheese that is quite hard to remove using anything.

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The other Matt is 100% correct. :+1:

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Exactly what @FirstCircle says!

“Acrylic” DOES NOT denote the nature of the thinner / carrier. Acrylic describes the way the binders in the paint form long molecular chains when they cure / dry. Acrylic paints can be formulated using any sort of carrier - water, cellulose (alcohol, lacquer thinners, etc.) or petroleum distillates (mineral spirits, etc.)

Some cellulose based acrylic paints will, indeed, accept some amount of water into solution because the cellulose thinner will mix to some degree with water (for example, alcohol thinners will mix with water), but that does not mean that water is the intended reducer for those paints. It’s more of an accident of chemistry than anything else.

This confusion over the nature of “acrylic paints” and the belief that they are all “water based” simply because they use the word “acrylic” is one of the worst modeling “urban legends” going. It causes no end of problems.

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