Posted by Edwardian on 15 Mar 2017, 14:42
As a newcomer, I unwittingly treated the soft HaT figures as I had the slightly harder plastic figures I was used to, e.g Airfix, Revell.
So, I washed them carefully in warm soapy water and then sprayed with good old Halfords Grey Car Primer.
I am quite diligent about washing. I soak, slosh and rub gently the figures in warm to hot soapy water, them rinse very carefully, dab off most of the water with a clean towel and then leave to air dry.
I found that primer on the muskets, bayonets and some legs of my HaT Napoleonic Spanish infantry flaked off on a significant minority of the batch.
I sought to remedy this by painting over the exposed areas of plastic with dilute PVA then undercoating these areas again.
This arrested the problem, with very few further chips emerging during the course of painting (a batch of 97). Now they are based and varnished and I have not had any further problems, so far.
For the many figures I had already undercoated, I have applied PVA over the primer, which is perhaps not ideal, but it does seem to have helped. If the paint flakes off, I will cover the exposed areas with PVA and re-prime as before.
My FIGZ Parade entrants were started after I discovered this issue, so these were coated with dilute PVA prior to priming. So far, they seem to have held up better than the figures that did not have that treatment.
My suggestion would be to wash as before, but then brush dilute PVA over vulnerable areas prior to painting. These areas include weapons, legs, plumes.