Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2017 November 26

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November 26

Slot car paint

I thought of this because there appears to be a new slot car fad happening among people my age. [1] Back then (the 1960s), our car bodies came as transparent plastic (Lexan, I think.) We would paint them with this weird paint that we applied to the inside of the car; on the inside, the paint looked silvery, while on the plastic side of the car (visible through the plastic) it came out some candy color or another. How the heck did that paint work? Does it still exist? (Next I'll ask what the tire treatments like "Moo Juice" were made of; they smelled like peppermint.) --jpgordon^{𝄢𝄆 𝄐𝄇} 01:51, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

It sounds as though you were using a metallic or pearlescent Lexan paint [2]. I also had slot cars in the 1960s, but mine were regular (opaque) polystyrene models rather than the vacuum-formed Lexan sort. Deor (talk) 12:44, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

• Chattoyance is where it's at. All of those pearlescent and similar paints work by being largely transparent, maybe with a translucent tint from a dye (not an opaque particulate pigment) and also a lot of fine metallic powder. These powders are flaked aluminium in very fine, but varyingly controlled sizes. Sometimes they're anodised to colour them. A few of the larger powders were plastic glitter with an aluminised (vacuum sputtered) surface.

As noted, it was universal to paint the inside of a transparent vac formed bodyshell.

The chattoyance is the amount of glitter you can see near the surface, with the colour predominating and becoming opaque as you look deeper into the paint film. In a full size spray shop, this is done by careful and skilled paintwork, carefully applying coats of many different paints to form a carefully constructed series of layers (there's as much skill in choosing these as there is in spraying them on). Typically there are three main layers: a coloured base coat, a tinted layer with metallics in it, then clear coats over the top. For models though, one coat, badly slapped on to the inside of the clear bodyshell will do nearly as good a job. Because it's painted from the top down, the application quality can't be seen (brush strokes are on the back). There's no clear coat needed, because the bodyshell does that. The behaviour of the paint, and the (incredibly complicated) tendency for the metal powder to settle out at the base of the paint (the "top", near the outer shell) as it's displaced from the curing surface of the paint film means that the dense colour and the metallics are also properly distributed. It's like magic, and any impatient small child can do it, no matter how ham-fisted or poorly equipped. Andy Dingley (talk) 13:27, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Heh. You hit on a good point there. I was quite ham-fisted when it came to painting models -- but it was quite satisfying how easily the candy color paint applied to the inside of the slot car body. It was hard to get wrong. But it's indeed the behavior of the paint -- that tendency for the metal powder to settle out -- that I'm interested in. --jpgordon^{𝄢𝄆 𝄐𝄇} 15:20, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

US stores: How busy is "Black Saturday" and "Black Sunday" compared to a normal weekend or weekday?

Is it busier than the corresponding regular Saturday or Sunday or does Black Friday use up so much buying demand that it's more like a regular Monday or even Tuesday? Is Cyber Monday quiet or is it full of housewives and annoying kids who haven't bought food since Thanksgiving (Eve)? (like regular Monday but worse) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:08, 26 November 2017 (UTC)

According to this, the Saturday after Black Friday is the 6th busiest shopping day of the year, while the Sunday doesn't rank in the top 10. --Jayron32 12:10, 27 November 2017 (UTC)

For one totally unreliable piece of anecdotal evidence, my local Target in Southern California seemed about normal on Saturday evening. Although, I had to wait in line because they were having problems with the self-checkouts. The trend seems to be that retailers have moved towards a "Black Weekend" or even a whole "Black Week" of sales, which probably spreads out traffic more evenly among days. For instance, my Target still had quite a few of their "doorbuster" TVs on sale at the entrance on Saturday. --47.157.122.192 (talk) 22:37, 27 November 2017 (UTC)