White Airliners

[alien]

Most Airliners seem to have a white body. I am building a DHC 3 Otter to be finished in Canadian Pacific Decals. I coated the plane in Tamiya White primer.It covered well and with a nice smooth finish. Is there any reason why I could not use the primer as my final white coat? The primer looks better than most white paint. Does anyone else use the primer as White paint?

Stephen

[Guilherme Kosciuv]

I prefer to use it only as primmer. For the final coat it´s better to use a gloss white, it´s much easier to polish.

[Jennings]

Primer is paint with a different label on it. If it looks okay, then go with it. There's nothing magic about primer.

[Jay Chladek]

The main thing about Tamiya primer is it does tend to be a little thin, so it takes a few coats to fully cover a dark spot. As such, I usually just use it as Primer for the surface treatment and do white over the top as even a thin layer or two of primer is good enough for the paint to go on. If you really like it though for a paoint coat, go for it as I've seen others do that as well. But, IMHO, Tamiya's Pure White spray is a very durable and very opaque gloss white. If you can use that, I doubt you would use any other gloss white for airliners ever again.

Edited October 14, 2011 by Jay Chladek

[Tim Bradley]

Stephen,

Completely OK, In fact I have stayed with just the primer on several models. I will polish the surface out with wet 1000 to 2000 grit sanding pads. Make sure you have a good layer of primer before polishing, being careful to watch the corners so you don’t sand through. Next, I wipe on or spray a coat of Future before I decal. After decaling, another one or two coats of Future and you are done. Like the TS-26 Pure White the primer does not yellow.

I use this method when I don’t want to loose surface detail.

Here is my Beech 18 and Bronco done this way. Both were IPMS National winners.

Tim Bradley