Bare Metal Hobby Paint Spray

[George]

Good Morning!  I wanted to get some advice from the community about hobby paint sprays.  I am building a 1969 Revell P-51B and I want to find hobby paint spray that can represent bare/natural metal for the wheel bays, the section fore and aft of the cockpit area, and the aircraft struts.  I don't want to spend a lot of time on the kit but I wanted to get some suggestions from the experts.  Tamiya makes several versions from bare metal silver (AS-series) to their TS-series.  Mr. Color, Model Master, and Vallejo also have aluminum/metal spray lacquers.  What do you gents think? Thanks, George

[LSP_Kevin]

You really can't go wrong with the Tamiya spray cans. They spray brilliantly (much better than the Model Master ones I've tried), and the quality of the paints is excellent. One tip for using any spray can, though: sit it in a container of warm-to-hot water for about 5 minutes to decrease the viscosity of the paint. This helps with paint flow out of the nozzle enormously.

 

Kev

[AlbertD]

What Kevin said. It even works great decanted from the spray can and airbrushed.

[patricksparks]

I've used the Tamiya lacquer spray cans too, and they work great, one thing I have noticed with the gloss and metal colors is you need to be careful about heavy coats as it may start to craze styrene molded parts, all kit styrene blend is not exactly the same from one manufacturer to another so they can react differently to lacquer. What I have done that seems to work is use Tamiya's lacquer primer, I really like the white, it goes down beautifully and I'm partial to their "Silver Leaf" for bare aluminum.

Good luck with whatever you decide to use !!!!

Pat

[scvrobeson]

Their AS-12 is great for replicating silver painted surfaces like you saw post-war, the TS-30 might be better for bare metal stuff if decanted and airbrushed.

 

 

 

Matt