Make Your Own Acrylic Thinner
How to make your own Acrylic Thinner
This in an article about how to make your own Acrylic Thinner for your Acrylic colors. It can be applied to almost all Acrylic modelling colors in the market today with more or less similar results. There are some colors like Tamiya and Gunze that can have different effect only because their synthesis is not pure Acrylic but Water-Oil paints.
Except from Suppliers recommendation about Thinning or their own produced Acrylic Thinners, Acrylic colors can be thinned with Tap water, Distilled water, I.P.A, cleaning liquid like Windex and other equivalent liquids. The result depends from many factors, like which color will be used, the thinning volume, the air pressure and many other.
You can do your own Acrylic Thinner that will last for long time and You can save considerable amount of cash at the same time. The ingredients are the following:
Four ingredients:
1. Distilled water
2. I.P.A Isopropyl Alcohol (99.9%)
3. Acrylic Flow Improver
4. Acrylic Fluid Retarder
The mixture is simple while the doses can be slightly not exactly accurate. A standard mixture for 100ml homemade Acrylic Thinner is: Distilled water 60ml – I.P.A 30ml – Acrylic Fluid Retarder 5ml – Acrylic Fluid Retarder 5ml
All ingredients needed for the mixture, otherwise the result will not satisfy you at all. There are number of references about homemade Thinners in the web.
Tips:
The best practice is to adjust the proportions of each of the four ingredients until you find that perfect mix for the range of Acrylic colors that you use most.
References:
http://www.nugax.com/Miscmodl/Thinner.html
http://www.cybermodeler.com/tips/thinner.shtml