I am getting back to the hobby, after three years since my wife passed and three years of taking care of her.
Yesterday my lady and I went to Rider’s Hobby Shop in Flint, Michigan.
I bought the Hasegawa 1/72 F9F Panther. I thought that a simple model with a simple scheme that I could “wet my feet” with again with my Paasche single action A/B, plus I really like the overall Dark Sea Blue.
However, there was a sign up saying that Rustoleum was no longer producing Model Master paints! I did buy a couple of bottles of MM Acryl DSB.
The lady behind the counter said a lot of their customers were angry about that.
Wow, where to go now? I have used those paints for decades!
Dark Sea Blue-FS15042 is sold under their part number MRP-A072
Out of luck on ADC Gray-FS16473 it looks like from them. They have a few “aircraft gray” colors though, so you could probably color match it with a little clever work with a photo editor program.
There are other paint lines out there, old and new, to pick up the slack. Humbrol, Vallejo, Mission Models, Mig, AK, and Gunze all come to mind for companies that do FS matched colors. Tamiya paints are good, but not FS matched. You have to mix those to get the proper shades. If you’re gonna use Model Master acrylics, make sure to use a good primer, not their acrylic one, in order to get proper adhesion to the plastic.
Thanks all for the advice. And I learnt my lesson about properly priming MM Acryl. In future I will probably use rattle can grey of some sort to prime.
Like you, I have had to “relearn” my painting skills after cutting my teeth on Model Master enamal paints, although I did love the old Floquil enamals - they seemed to spray so much better, with finer pigments. Once Testors bought them and shut them down, then the MM paints became the mainstay.
Also like you, I was away for many years, and returned later to find many of my paints had dried up and had to be replaced. I was then away for a time again, and when I returned the second time, I found that some of those paints had dried up, but this time there were no replacements available in the MM line! One big problem was a 1/72 scale Monogram B-52 (like I said: BIG) that I had started with a SAC (Strategic Air Command) color scheme already started with no paints to replace bad ones. I only managed to find some of the tan I was looking for in a rattle and and learned to decant paint into bottles.
Why would Rustoleum buy Testors only to shut them down? Who knows? A lot of things in business make no sense to me.
Sorry to hear about your loss, one of my absenses was due to caring for an ill parent.
I still have a lot of MM bottles but I’m slowly loosing them. I replace them with Vallejo, Tamiya, lifelike, Revell and Mission Models. Like Stick said, there are a lot of manufacturers taking up the slack. I’ve heard MRP and Mig are very good but have not tried them yet.
What Testors really did is change the role of MM. It is no longer oriented towards military colors. It if more broadly oriented towards a general hobby/craft market Right now there is little difference between the MM brand and the just-plain-enamel basic line. I do see signs that MM may trend to favor car modeling. Testors enamel is still the same old stull from previous decades, with some new metallic colors and more semi-gloss colors. The company has retained their acrylic line, and is moving into more lacquer paints.
If you do not like to mix paints but want one bottle military colors you will have to change brands. But the good news is that there is a great surge in the number of hobby brands now, but you have to buy them at hobby shops or online. if you are not a purist about color accuracy, Testors paints areastill there. Hobby Lobby stores carry big racks of Testors paints.
Our local HL has 0 Testors short of the little Testors sets of paint. They carry some Vellejo Model Color and some Createx. Course outside the model department they have craft paints and artist paints. But that store has a very limited hobby section anyway…