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Problem w/ Tamiya paint?


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Has anybody had a problem with Tamiya paints pinholing in the finish coat? I just painted a model in the Chrome yellow, and just after laying down the final wet coat, it appeared that the paint started to wrinkle in a few places, after letting it dry for 24 hours I proceeded to color sand w/2000 wet paper & it looked as if it was solving the problem but on close inspection the paint in the affected areas have very minute pinhole like the pain had tried to "air out" & caused the appearance of wrinkling. did I put the wet coat on too heavy, or too soon, or what. Thanks for the answers, I know I'll get a few.

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Some Tamiya colors, especially Chrome Yellow, are more prone than others to having propellant bubbles appear in the paint if you apply it too heavily. The propellant in the can doesn't have a chance to fully atomize before hitting the surface, and it bubbles as it tries to escape, and it looks pretty gruesome on a model.

I had it happen this weekend on my LeMans build Jaguar, using an old can of British Green and spraying heavy/wet coats, it caused the paint to both run and get some bubbles in a couple of spots because I had a few small fisheyes show up in the first coats and I was literally flooding parts of the model with the green to get them to fill in (thankfully the damage was more on the underside and not in the most visible areas) which I had to let cook in my dehydrator for 3 or 4 hours before wet sanding with 1500-2400 Micromesh and then re-shooting the green from a fresh can and lighter coats, covered w/a several good coats of clear which fixed my problem w/o recurrence. Many builders see a problem like the one I had and freak out and strip the paint; while I remain calm (who, me? :D ) and just deal with the problem and fix it! I'm too impatient to wait for the paint to strip and spend so much time starting from scratch with paint. My second round of paint was nearly perfect, and Tamiya paint shrinks down a lot, you can spray a bunch of it on a model and won't fill in the panel lines unless they were really faint from the beginning.

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I had actually spoke to a friend of mine and he said he had some problems with Tamiya paint as well. He had one of the guys he works with analyze it and said he had found traces of water in the paint. Not sure how tru this is but this may be a cause of the problem too. I personally had problems with pearl white.

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Thanks guys, I never thought about the propellant thing, I've been a painter of full size cars since '67, & though I'd seen about everything there was to see,. I have had problems on a full size Cadillac with cratering due to solvent popping due to too much material & the top coat sealing before it could gas out enough, but that looked like tiny fish eye in the finish. On the subject of covering fish eye if you do get it, it will cover much easier if you just mist on a couple of coats until the paint sticks, then lay on your heavy coat to flow the finish out.

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