Thinners for brush painting enamels?

[TonyOD]

I worship at the altar of the hairy stick, and get through seemingly gallons of white spirit used as thinner and to clean brushes.

 

I saw this quote elsewhere: "household white spirit is the fool's thinner of choice for enamels."

 

It's probably true, but as a brush painter what would I stand to gain by shelling out my hard-earned for "proper" thinners?

 

Thanks 

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

Haha.

 

Yes that sounds like the sort of inflammatory thing I'd say!

 

You can keep a jar with a lid on it for white spirit for cleaning brushes. There's nothing wrong with that and the lid should minimise the stink generally. For your actual paint thinning, the two most important differences you should notice immediately after changing to a bonafide enamel thinner are:

 

1) Shorter drying times. Enamel thinners typically use naptha as the base ingredient which has an average molecule length half that of white spirit. It's a lighter hydrocarbon fraction making it a thinner thinner than white spirit but also with a faster evaporation rate - this is what makes your applied paint film flash off faster. The ultra-slow drying times of enamels assumed to be inherent are mostly attributable to white spirit as the chosen thinner. Many have been driven away from enamels entirely due to bad side effects of a poor choice of thinners.

 

2) Naptha smells much less strongly than white spirit. Some say that what smell it does give off is less disagreeable too, but that's subjective. The smell isn't zero, but it's not anywhere near as bad as white spirit which stinks the house out in short order. This matters more on the model than for clean up since you can lid a jar after clean up but the thinned paint film on your model will continue to evaporate off until dried, so white-spirit-thinned enamel painted models continue to make their presence known for a day or two after you painted them. This side effect which has driven many away from enamel entirely will be much reduced.

 

 

Just because the paint will disperse in it doesn't make it a great choice of thinner