Painting - Part 1 Primers

[FloridaBoy]

The purpose of this thread is to convey some of the stuff I have learned over the past few months building and painting my models. In the Golden Era, I used to prime only when I had the paint, then undercoat, then paint Pactra Candies and Metallics on one day, and in those often circumstances a glitch happened, it made my day rotten from the start.

Nowadays, things are different. With the advent of terrific paints and solvents, if you make a mistake you can go right on and correct it without reversing the entire painting process. What used to take me a day to paint a car, now takes over a week or more overall.

Plus, based on my own situation of trial and error, I have come up with what works for me best. I am not exclusively an airbrush painter, but use spray cans pretty much as well. So, here goes.

The first step is primer. Now I primer everything, even parts on motors that I intend to handpaint. Why, because the primer is a good background and holds paint evenly so you do not have bunching up at the cracks and crevices. I have taken so much advice when it comes to primers, I was getting pretty discouraged because not every primer treats a model well. So far I have eliminated Testor's Primers as they do not cover well, and dry too slowly, and still can react to paint above it. Same goes for other enamels, so now I use Duplicolor primers I get at the Auto Parts stores, and they seal the cars whether I use a lacquer, enamel or urethane based paint. I also primer the entire car underneath the shell and on both sides of the chassis, even where not seen. This prevents overspray from reacting the plastic, and your model is completely protected.

I have also found that there are two Duplicolor primers available, and in three colors, white, gray and red. I use gray most of the time, and find all spray on very evenly, are forgiving regarding runs and too thick coats, fill the little scratch and sand marks well, and protect the plastic from just about every chemical invader.

There are TWO (2) DupliColor Primers. One is called Filler Primer, which is very grainy, and covers very well, needing only about 1 coat at most, but somewhat grainy when complete. This grainy surface is designed to fill those little scratchmarks, sand marks, blemishes, etc that your fine sandpaper just didn't get to. I use this primer only on certain bodies in which I did a significant amount of body work which will need the fine detailed filling. It needs to be sanded, with both fine dry and about 2000 grit wet, then ready for either undercoating or another coat of primer.

The second primer is called Sealer Primer. This has a smoother finish, and is designed to be the final primer before undercoating. It also is a stong protector, and I use it when I build a car with a lot of molded on details, which needs little clean up and will retain the details. It too, produces a very smooth finish. Often I apply a light coat of this over the filler primer just to inspect the body work I did.

You need to make sure both primers finish are not touched or recoated for a couple of days at the least to give the paint time to settle in, then take a magnifying glass or opti-visor and go over the model searching and correcting any missed areas, such as mold marks, parting lines, sink marks, and other imperfections.

So this concludes the primer process. I am learning to build models to compete with some of the hot modelers in my club, not to mention those guys throughout the state and on this forum 00who have a long head start in really getting down to painting a model with a superlative finish.

I am not writing this because I have a particular expertise about painting, but I do have some creds with body work, and if you do really apply yourself in this area, you will be rewarded with a paint finish that will last for years. I have two cars that I did correctly back in '65 completely by accident that still have a competitive sheen.

To me primer is a very important foundation to any model. Without a proper primed surface, you will see many many imperfections to the finish of any good model. I have seen some really great models with silver or white showing through at door jambs, chrome trlm and other spots, and when judging, I really down these unprimed cars with lots of points deducted.

Ken "FloridaBoy" Willaman