So, I'm succumbing to the lure of a paper panzer that never got painted (there's a law that every modeller of German WW2 armor has to do one I was told) and am curious when the primer got painted on? I am assuming that the primer was painted on whenever a component got completed, so an assembled hull was steel until it was welded together, then the primer sprayed on. Roadwheels and pieces that got bolted to the large components would have been primered before placing? Am I on the right track or is there more to it than that? The big question is whether welds would be showing as bright or would they be painted over when the primer was placed.

Thanks for any and all guidance.

Matt

Matt F.;

Hi!

Short of seeing an actual production-process manual or record, our best guess would be based on whatever one knows of general equipment manufacturing process. My following comments base on my brief "career" (including painting...) in heavy-equipment manufacturing when but young... NO process expertise is claimed!

The primer was put on mostly to facilitate and support finish painting. As finish painting addressed more-or-less completed assemblies and whole vehicles, one can assume that primer covered both material (plate, castings) surfaces and bolts and welds used in at least structural sub-assembly, and was probably applied late in the assembly steps (i.e., when a hull-tub was fully assembled with major structural fittings - raw engine-mount castings, etc., BUT no optics, no electrical conduiting, no small add-on moving parts (drive pedal assemblies, etc.), and NO machined / finished surfaces, such as bearings left exposed to get painted.

Of note for all who consider, for instance, doing a StuG III interior with some exposed rot-oxide... that hull would have been primed BEFORE the drive-train and suspension items were installed - so those add-ins would appear as "factory-finished goods in OEM colors" mounted into the red hull. All of the above add-ins came from other factories already finish-painted and would not get primed once installed within the new hull.

Some add-on structural sub-assemblies may well have advanced beyond primer-stage before being added into a vehicle hull - in which case something like a heavy radiator-mount or engine base MAY have been primed AND finish-painted elsewhere, much like the OEM-finished tranny, and installed into a primer-red hull space. Could add some interesting color and dimension to an interior build???

Hope this helps you as you think up your approach!

Bob

It does, thank you! I'm working on an E-25 and am leaning towards a primed hull in rotbraun and the fenders in black (hey, they may have done it that way on Panthers and Jagdpanthers, so...) and I'm thinking the turret in bare metal (Thanks to Adam Wilder's articles I just have to try it!).

Slightly , but an order from December '45 (I don't have my reference handy so I don't know specifics) specified armor components to be painted green before being sent for final assembly. Isn't this odd to base coat parts before completion, as green was to be the new base color beginning in '45? Or might the green be green colored primer (primer can be colored)and have the vehicle both primered and base coated at the same time, saving both time and paint? Is there any evidence of late panzers having the green base coat with red primer underneath?

Hi, Mr. B.!

OK… You actually pose a nest of interesting questions!

I don’t KNOW anything about any putative 1945 painting orders – they may well be, or not – so I cannot fairly say anything about them! And if one is doing a what-if panzer, positing such is A-OK, far as I am concerned!

As to the more-technical aspects…

Painting big sub-assemblies at some separate factory and pulling together fully-painted units into a whole machine or vehicle is a long-established auto and heavy-machinery practice. We already know here that things like engines and trannies came to final assembly plants “OEM painted”. Why not turrets built and finished elsewhere?

By me, this opens up some very cool ideas… a modeler could paint up a “fully-finished turret” brought in and mated with a finished hull – where both items wear completed “factory” paint-schemes… which are subtly or even grossly different! Sort of like those who place “primer turrets” on finished hulls, only both units are finished, but differ, in this plan.

Can you (or those 1945 Germans) tint primer a different color – say green? Of course you can. But the color and the primer function are different questions… IF the primer is to be used as primer, why change its color? IF the primer is now to be the one and only “base-coat”, I suppose that green would be adaptive to the new use, but this would be to negate the conventional practices of primer followed by paint… not saying folks would not do this (a tinted primer only), just that we have no indication of this. And this would have called for having paint companies make a new green primer – in 1945? When getting any paints to assembly factories was an iffy proposition?

Modeling this use of a single tinted primer as base would call for some careful approaches, I think… perhaps doing some careful “surface-rusting” to show where tinted primer was left off? This suggesting that the one primer-green coat was sparsely-applied. Of course, if this green primer coat was to be chipped or worn, it should reveal… naked steel! Which would most likely be surface-rusted pretty fast.

Evidence for late-war panzers with green base-coats “over primer"? I would say that I ASSUME that all were primed, even to the very end, as that was the standard production process in the industry, so I would expect that a late-war panzer wearing a green base-coat still had red primer beneath. But what evidence do we have? Not much, if any!

Either way one feels about much of this, there are a lot of interesting late-war and paper-panzer possibilities, here!

Just my opinions, of course!

Cheers!

Bob