Painting During Assembly

Many of the instruction sheets that come with the kits suggest that the pieces be painted before removal from their surrounding brass or wood. This may or may not be a good idea.

The Micro Structures "Mid State Bank" was the first brass kit which I painted with enamels before beginning construction. This worked very well, with only a little touching up needed to cover a few scratches incurred during assembly.

However, while assembling the El Grande Hotel, a laser-cut wood kit, I found

some pieces are better left to later for painting.

Don't paint pieces with fine structure before removing them from the surrounding wood. In the El Grande Hotel kit the stair railings, the porch and the veranda all have thin posts or other narrow parts. My acrylic paint tended to fill in the cracks between the part and the surrounding wood. This glued the pieces back together and also tended to hide the tiny, uncut spots that kept the pieces from falling out of the surrounding wood. A thinner blade than my X-Acto knife might have helped. I found that the narrow posts and railings tended to break when I tried to cut them loose. They also seemed to bend easily, so the acrylic paint may have softened them. Perhaps they needed to dry longer. A solvent-based enamel paint might have lessened this problem, but probably wouldn't have done anything to prevent the paint from seeping into the laser cuts and gluing the parts back to the surrounding wood. Parts with fine structure are are better off removed and assembled before painting.