Tamiya spray primers

Tamiya make excellent paints, and have a series of spray can primers for undercoating purposes. Their primers are pretty good, but have some pros and cons to consider.

Good points

• Very smooth primer.

• The “fine” versions of the primer do a great job of not obscuring details.

• Lays down nicely, leaves a great finish.

• Available in a few useful and less useful colours.

• Can be removed with isopropanol if you realize you made a mistake.

• Sands easily once properly dry.

• Responds well to being warmed – you get a finer, more consistent spray if you heat up the can in hot water.

• Fairly dense pigments that block underlying colour well. Note that the fine light grey does not colour-block as well as the (not fine) grey.

Bad points

• Quite costly.

• The spray cans are only available in small (teeny 100 mL and small 180 mL) quantities.

• Somewhat strange combination of colour and thickness options. Most of the primers are “fine” primers, which are slightly less thick and don’t obscure details much. But grey primer is not described as “fine” and is slightly thicker. It’s intended as a filler primer for light marks and blemishes.
  However, “light grey” is only available in fine and the slightly darker “grey” primer is only available in non-fine. Strange, and potentially annoying if that isn’t the combination you want. Or if you buy the wrong shade of grey by mistake. Or if you use both types of primer and find inconsistent shading.

• No black primer, which sucks. Fortunately Mr Hobby Finishing Surfacer 1500 and Citadel Chaos Black are both great black primers.

• Not available as an equivalent range of bottled primers for use with airbrushes. They do make white and grey “liquid” bottled primers, which are similar.

• Can drip and run if overapplied or used in cold or humid conditions, though that’s hardly unusual for spray can paint. To be fair it does tend to drip less than other primers I’ve used.

• Somewhat stinky. Smellier than their TS spray cans generally.

• Probably full of unpleasant chemicals. No longer legal for sale in Canada for this reason. (possibly it’s because the spray paints contain 2-butoxyethanol) Hopefully Tamiya can come up with a new formulation that’s as effective but less toxic. Life is short as it is; it’d be great if we can avoid unnecessary poisons!

Available rattlecan spray primers

Tamiya describe their primers as “surface primer L”, but I don’t know what the L is supposed to stand for. Lacquer, maybe?

• White Fine primer L 180mL 87044

• Light Grey Fine primer L 180mL 87064

• Grey (not fine!) primer L 180mL 87042

• Red Oxide (a kind of rusty maroon red in semigloss; for painting military models that are supposed to look like red oxide primer was used) primer L 180mL 87160

• Pink Fine primer L (for underpainting stuff that’s supposed to be painted red, orange, yellow) 180mL 87146

• Grey (not fine!) primer L 100mL (the tiny size) 87026

• Metal primer L (clear primer for adhesion to metal) 100mL (the tiny size) 87061

Bottles

• Liquid white primer 40mL 87096

• Liquid light grey primer 40mL 87075

• Liquid metal (clear) primer 40 mL 87204