Recently, I began building a tornado chase vehicle using Tamiya's Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited kit. It's my first Tamiya kit and I've been eager to build it since I've heard high praise for Tamiya's kits. The Jeep has excellent detail and it's going together beautifully, but I have one major gripe: Many of the parts are molded in black plastic! I knew it would be difficult to paint those parts with the light colors (e.g. flat aluminum) recommended for some of them. Model Master flat medium gray as a primer helped to some degree, but even it was too dark to see molding flaws easily. M.M. flat light gray as a primer allowed me to see the flaws, but it didn't cover as well; the black plastic "bled through" worse.
Hard as that is, the black plastic makes it even harder to test-fit parts or prepare them for assembly. The other day, I struggled to visually locate a mold seam I could feel, but no matter how much light I used (including a hiker's head lamp), I could not see it. The black plastic absorbed all the light! I finally resorted to applying the light gray paint so I could at least see what the devil I was doing!
I realize when a model is molded in black, it's usually because the prototype is black. (To wit: the Batmobile; the B-2 "Stealth" bomber; the P-61 "Black Widow.") But because unpainted plastic looks unrealistic and we also have to fill in and sand seams (creating highly visible microscratches in the black plastic), most of us are going to be painting the parts black anyway. (Indeed, the Cherokee's instructions call for painting some of the black-molded parts semigloss--you guessed it!--black!) So why mold the kits in black?
Here's a heartfelt plea to kit manufacturers: PLEASE mold your kits in white or a LIGHT neutral color (gray or tan) instead of black or other dark colors. Apart from making building easier, it will also save us modelers a lot of eyestrain and headaches!
Anybody else have similar problems? Does anybody have any idea why some kits are molded in black?