Let’s face the cold, hard facts.
Water based acrylics will never stick to plastic, no matter what the additives are.
You can use Badger Stynylrez, Ammo One Shot, AK 3rd Gen Primer, Mission Models Primer, or in this case the NO-PEEL Surface Primer from VMS. The adhesion is not going to be great and you will never know right until the point of peeling it off.
So let’s see what the branding says. No peel surface primer…
They even write NO-PEEL in capital letters. They sure as shit mean business.
And how does that no peel look in real life, let’s have a look.
Well…
NO-PEEL my ass!
Pardon my French, but I was absolutely furious after this happened.
Before you think that I went deliberately and taped up the whole plane just to prove a point, you are wrong. I wanted to use Tamiya flexible tape when the first issue happened. And that tape is not even that sticky. It is one of the mildest tapes when it comes to stick strength.
That blew the lid off my mind so hard that I just grabbed an Ammo masking tape and went to town on all parts of the plane. Sure as shit, there was no spot on the plane where the primer would’ve stayed on after the first peel and that spiraled in to what you see above as the end result of my sticky rage.
I was preparing to praise VMS to above and beyond as I already fell in love with their varnishes and initial tests I made prior with this primer showed promises. I went in with full confidence that this is going to be all fine and there will be no problem. Well, we can all see how wrong I was.
Ever since I got back in to the hobby, I was invested in water based acrylic products for the lack of fumes and brain damage causing toxic particles. I religiously kept on buying paints to find the one I can use with most confidence.
I started off with Vallejo and Ammo paints, from there went and fell in love with Mission Models and did some side steps in to AK 3rd Generation and now been trying Ammo’s new ATOM paints.
Of course with acrylic paints I needed acrylic primers and varnishes.
My first subjects were Ammo One Shot primers and Lucky Shot varnishes and both of them I hated from the very beginning.
The primer was too thick and the layers too thick. The varnish was horrible, like a rubbery skin.
So I went to Mission Model Primers and varnishes and I was happy. Not very happy, but much happier than before.
The primer is much easier to handle and spray and has good texture and the varnish was tough and also easy to spray.
But there were problems. With every build I found myself experiencing peeling. My worst was when I was building the big 1/35 scale Stuka from Border Model.
So yeah, paint peeling is a common visitor. Nearly every plane I’ve built had it for some degree due to masking.
Needless to say, when I heard of the primers from VMS, I instantly smashed the BUY NOW button to get some as I was blown away by their varnishes. It was a no brainer purchase and I had high hopes that this primer is going to be the one.
So I did some testing as soon as they arrived and overall I was confident. No problem spraying out of the bottle, good coverage and good texture. But there were some signs.
First one was, that the surface texture can come out a bit rough. Now this might be in case where one does a dry layer, where you spray it from a distance so the paint will dry somewhat mid air before hitting the surface. Usually that is good when one needs to give a bit more grip strength to the next set of layers. But is it something a water based acrylic would benefit from?
The second one was peeling, the same one you see above. But the reason I didn’t give too much thought to it as it was an experiment. I wanted to see, if I can get a more smoother surface texture, if I thin the primer a bit. For that, I used Vallejo airbrush thinner, the only one I found playing nicely with this primer.
This peeling led me to believe that it is a byproduct of too much thinning and eventually having the mixture so thin that the primer loses it’s surface gripping properties.
I had a positive result on the surface texture though, but the cost was too high, so I abandoned the project.
But now, here we are and I am second guessing myself.
This might not be the NO-PEEL primer they try to claim after all.
It might be, that it is impossible to have a good water based primer, as it will never have the properties of a lacquer one, where the primer eats itself in to the plastic.
It might be, that you have to have the perfect combination of well mixed and shaken primer, completely clean plastic surface and a plastic surface texture that is very good for the paint to hold on to.
A lot of points of failure come to my mind.
Have I shaken it long enough?
Was the model clean enough?
Did I spray it from the right distance?
Did I spray it with the right pressure?
Have I made sure that the stars are in alignment?
So many question, so few answers and so much MOJO killing experience.
In the end I am still going to try and give it a couple more tries, but I am very close to completely abandoning water based primers and even paints if I have to. Seeing how many god damn paints I bought over the years, it will be a pain to do this step, but if that’s what it takes to get constant and good results, then so be it.