Tamiya Acrylic Paint
A few years back, the Testors paint company discontinued their Floquil line of enamel hobby paints, these were a real favorite for many model railroaders. Several years earlier Testors also ceased production of a Floquil-based stain called Flo-Stain and again, it was a popular choice among hobbyists.
More recently, Testors made the decision to cease production of their Polly Scale acrylic paints. Search the online user forums and you can see the outcry this caused, I suspect in part because the Polly Scale acrylics had railroad-specific colors in the line. Also of course, once you get used to a certain product you don’t like to change.
Having recently exhausted several of my old Polly Scale paints, I took around to see what folks were using as a Polly Scale alternative and I kept running across the Tamiya line of paint. I’ve seen the Tamiya paints before of course, but as I was happy with Polly Scale, I didn’t pay too much attention. Now that my personal collection of Polly Scale has been depleted, I figured it’s time to try this Tamiya.
What also influenced me to buy some Tamiya was that on many user forums, Tamiya seems to be very popular for airbrush use. Somewhat surprisingly, many users didn’t seem to care for it for conventional brush painting though I’m not entirely sure why.
Although Tamiya is an acrylic paint, it has this warning on the bottles: Flammable liquid and vapors. Contains isopropanol + glycol ethers. Polly Scale had similar warnings. Tamiya also sells a thinner that’s recommended for use with their paints and while I often use cheaper, homemade thinning solutions like water or windshield wiper fluid for airbrush use, I figured I’d stick with the Tamiya program and use their branded thinner initially.
I also picked up their aerosol spray primer to use on my metal models. I’ve heard great things about this paint and how the results are quite good, maybe due to a finer pigment. Again, I’m sticking with the Tamiya program to begin with in order to give these paints a fair test.
Last on the order list was some Tamiya masking tape in a couple of different width sizes. What the heck, I was online buying anyway so sure, I’ll take some tape with that order!
We’ll be featuring the Tamiya on some metal model projects upcoming, stay tuned for the Tamiya results.
A quick postscript. I planned to test out the Tamiya primer and paint today on the new Showcase Miniatures Container Trailer and the PECO Nn3 tram shells. Just before I began painting, I realized I bought the wrong primer, or at least not the primer I planned on using. Tamiya it seems makes a regular and a fine primer. The fine primer gets raves online for having a very smooth finish, but when I ordered the paint I didn’t realize this and ordered their regular primer.
When I get the fine primer, I’ll do a side-by-side comparison of the two primers. In the meantime, I’ll look more carefully when I order online.
D’oh! Curse you endless and competitively priced online buying options for confusing me!
Category: Blog
