I don’t post negative reviews of things (well, except for
Hobbycraft kits, and that’s okay, everybody rags on those!) so this is
something of a departure. It must be very rare for the words “Tamiya” and
“miscue” to appear in the same sentence, but they are about to here.
I came to try Tamiya White Putty for the simple expedient of
the fact that my usual filler, Squadron White, is unobtainable in Australia at
this time due to the local distributor no longer dealing with Squadron
Products, and after twenty years of using that type it was a bad time to run
out. It certainly highlights how used to a thing we can become, and while I am
certainly willing to say that it is a matter of familiarity as to how much
utility we get from a thing, there are also certain desirable and undesirable
characteristics that go a long way to determining how suitable a product is.
Tamiya seem to have formulated an almost useless product. I
hear howls of refute from modellers who are perfectly happy with it, and that’s
fine, I can only report my own perceptions, attuned as they are to the Squadron
product, and they are:
- Tamiya putty comes liquid from the tube. This in itself is not a bad thing, thinning putty is an old trick, but you don’t always want a thinned putty. Being a liquid, it is subject to capillary action, and I have observed on three occasions that the putty actively resists entering small spaces, which is the precise opposite of what it should be doing.
- Tamiya putty dries rock hard. The amount of elbow grease needed to cut it back is so excessive I fear parts will come adrift, and if you leave it overnight you’re in for the sanding job from hell. The options are to use a harder grade of wet-or-dry paper, but now you’ll start scouring into the surrounding plastic and need to somehow repair the surface, perhaps a sanding and polishing series. After dressing a simple gap? I don’t think so.
- Tamiya putty chemically etches plastic. Static effects and its natural stickiness draw it all over the job and it seems no amount of sanding will entirely remove its signature from plastic it has touched.
- Tamiya putty shrinks. Filling the motorisation holes in an old tank hull bottom – and we’re talking holes really only a few millimetres wide – took six applications because each time it dried it shrank into a pronounced pit. This is frustrating to say the least, and the rubdown required to deal with the agglomeration of putty that inevitably collects around the job after that many applications was not appreciated.
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