Our friends at Tamiya were kind enough to send over their new Mercedes-Benz Arocs Tipper Truck for review when it was released. That was months ago. When the truck arrived we jumped right on the build. The chassis, drivetrain and suspension were built within just a few days of its arrival. But assembly came to a halt when we had to start painting parts. There are a lot of parts to paint on the truck and painting at our location can only be done outside. The weather unfortunately did not cooperate with us and the painting was put off because of lots of rain and humidity. Paint just does not do well in those conditions. So we’ve waited and waited and finally now going into fall, the weather has just turned for the better for painting. So today we’re outside painting as much as we can.
Our painting set-up is pretty simple. We’ve set up a wooden dowel between a stair gap to hang parts on. To hang the parts, we cut up some old wire hangers and made a “J-hook” at each end. One for the part to hang from, the other to hang the part on the dowel. Now we can hold the parts by the wire and spray them. The wire is secured to a part of the tree or truck part that won’t interfere with the final paint work.
We’ve chosen Tamiya TS-8 Italian Red as our final color for the truck. To get the color as vibrant as possible we’re going with Tamiya’s (87146) Fine Surface Primer (L) as a base coat. This primer is pink which will make the red “pop” much more when completed.
We’re spraying multiple fine coats of primer on the parts for thin even coverage before we switch over to the red.
Some parts had to be cut off from the parts trees that we’re spraying red because they are a different color. To hold those parts, we’ve stuck them to masking tape to hold them while we spray them. You may be wondering what we’ll do with the unpainted spots where we cut the parts from the tree. We’ll go back later and touch those parts up with some paint and a brush. There are many ways to paint parts, some modelers completely cut the parts off of the tree first. Some will use an airbrush for fine painting details. Since we’ll be using this truck and it’s not a static model, the method of painting we’re showing you works best for our models intentions.
We’re excited to finish our Tamiya Mercedes Benz Arocs 56357. Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel HERE so you don’t miss the video review when it’s completed!
