MoFo

A metal ruler and a razor blade. For all intents and purposes, this is what all the PE folding tools are, you're just paying $30 for a spring so you don't have to hold the ruler down yourself. ;) Line the fold line up along the edge of the ruler, slide the blade under the part and fold it up.

What kind of paint? Acrylics can be removed with Windex or any other glass cleaner. Enamels can be removed with oven cleaners, acetone or CA de-bonder. These generally don't harm the plastic, but test on some scrap to be safe. You can also use straight paint thinner in small doses (NOT lacquer thinner), though it tends to craze/damage plastic if used liberally - don't soak parts in it. Lacquers can generally be removed with acetone or CA de-bonder. The paint itself (or rather, the thinner/carrier) will likely have crazed the surface of the plastic already, in which case you may need to p

Thanks everyone, I appreciate it! Eye Spy, are you saying to use the blade to score the foil, then the needle to completely cut through it? Thanks for the help! No, you use the pin to peel away the excess. The blade actually cuts the foil. I'm personally fond of outlining canopies with thin lengths of masking tape, then filling in with liquid mask. Much faster and easier than filling in with tape and with less residue.

The turps ate through the acrylic gloss (and then enamel). Any sort of gloss paint should be left as long as possible to cure, be it acrylic, lacquer or enamel, particularly when applying a wash - you're applying strong solvents in liberal amounts over the paint; if it's still soft, obviously it won't be able to stand up. Even though it may have been dry to the touch, it was probably still soft under the surface, which allowed the turps to cut through it. Next time, leave gloss to cure for a couple of days (acrylics). It's also possible that the Gunze paints aren't robust enough to stand u

Any weathering you do should be over top of the decals - after all, real aircraft markings weather too. :D The main problem with doing panel lines with pencils is the colour. They'll look a sort of metallic mid-grey. You'll want to use the softest graphite you can find, but even still, a wash may be a better option.

500 can be applied by brush to fill seams. It does tend to shrink substantially, so pretty liberal applications, though not so thick that it's running off the model. :D It can be smoothed out with nail polish remover, CA de-bonder or sanding - it wet sands beautifully. Cleans up with lacquer thinner. 1000 is a finer, thinner version of 500. Less useful for seam filling, it can be used for minor surface imperfections and checking finished seams. Thin it HEAVILY with lacquer thinner to airbrush (Gunze's Mr. Color thinner may be better, as it aparently has a sort of retarder in it), and it

The one problem I can see with the Testors compressor is that it LOOKS like it's JUST the compressor, which means that the air will be pulsing, rather than a steady stream. That will make it very difficult to paint fine lines or do freehand painting, though it's not really a huge issue if you're just painting large areas or using masks. The compressor with tank is really the best option out there if you can find one for a reasonable price, since it provides a steady airflow.

I've experimented with it, and VASTLY prefer Mr. Surfacer 500. The two are supposed to be fairly similar, but I found the white out didn't harden as much as I wanted, and was just generally harder to sand/scrape/deal with.

It depends how glossy the paint itself is. It also depends how prone the decals are to silvering. Your best bet would be to spray some scrap plastic with the grey, let it cure, then apply some spare decals off the sheet you'll be using to see how well they react. You SHOULD be fine, but better safe than sorry.

:blink: That is a FANTASTIC idea! So simple, so obvious. Why didn't I think of that?!? :) I'm off to play around with some markers now. :P

You can also use toothpicks and artist's blending stupmps for various effects. There really isn't any "best" way to do it - it's a question of what works, and what effect you're trying to achieve.

Lacquer thinner. Straight, simple, cheap lacquer thinner. You can use it to thin the stuff, and to clean it up. Mr. Color Thinner is essentially lacquer thinner with some additives that help the Mr. Colour paints flow better (and Mr. Surfacer, if you're airbrushing it), but you can get by every bit as well with run of the mill lacquer thinner, especially if it's just for clean up. You can also use acetone to remove excess, per the no-sand seam filling technique in the Tools and Tips section of the website. CA debonder also works well for this and is faster acting than acetone, though obvi

Have you looked into small beads at a craft store? They're small, they're round, they're pre-drilled... Should work well. Regarding putties, epoxy putty should also work fine. It does become hard when cured - harder than plastic, but it's certainly not impenetrable stuff. :wacko: It might be a pain drilling into something that tiny, but that's nothing to do with what it's made of. An alternative would be to poke the back of a drill bit into some still soft putty, making the indentation without the need for drilling.

^ What he said. They aren't load bearing and they shouldn't take much handling, so just a couple of small dabs of CA will work fine. Enough that they'll stick, but too much will mean longer curing times and just a general mess. Glue it on, be patient, make sure it's set, then move on to the next item. It also helps if you scrape the paint off of the areas to be glued (and ONLY the areas to be glued - you don't want bare plastic showing), as gluing paint to paint means you have weaker bonds on both sides of the join.

I suspect from the nature of the question that the white is being brush painted, in which case thinning with lacquer thinner would probably be a bad idea. ;) A light grey base coat will help if you're brush painting, but as others have said, white is one of the toughest shades to deal with - I can't even imagine trying to brush paint it. :( Probably the easiest way to handle it would be with a spray can, using repeated light, misty coats to build up opacity without obscuring the detail (or crazing the plastic). You'll have to do substantial masking if there's any other colours on the mo

Actually no, that's Mo's way of asking "***?" ;) If you're after instrument dials though, both Waldron and ReHeat do them (in metal and decal form, respectively). If they're unavailable or prohibitively expensive locally, there's many, many places on-line that retail them.

;)

http://www.aircraftresourcecenter.com/tnt1...pies/tnt037.htm Don't. It sprays perfectly fine out of the bottle.

THIS ain't gonna last long...

It's probably more to do with the fact that the shiny finishes aren't the same harsh laquers that the non-shiney ones are. Highly polished aluminium and chrome are both seperate, individual shades that are quite different from the standard metallics - they require different primers and different handling, and can't/shouldn't be mixed.

Well it's a bit of a long story, but it was a massive success. Always go for tools that can multi-task, that's what I say....

Aren't the Tamiya spray cans (or at least some of them) laquer based? Could explain the difference between spray bombed and airbrushed.

It's a two-part epoxy mix. Particularly well suited to filling large gaps, since it doesn't shrink (actually, in my limited experience with milliput, it seems to expand?). You can smooth/shape it with a moistened finger to remove excess and blend it in, and it's quite hard when cured (both a blessing and a curse) - somewhere between CA and tube putties for hardness. Apparently the superfine white is the best stuff for modelling purposes. An additional benefit is that the softer, brownish/yellow component of the regular milliput makes an excellent fake turd.

Mr. Surfacer 500. It's similar to white-out/typing correction fluid but easier to work with, has good tooth, sands and polishes beautifully, applies easily. The only downside is the shrinkage, so repeated application is key for heavier seams. (brush on, wait 5 - 10 minutes, daub on another layer and repeat)

Actually, oven cleaner DOESN'T do much to it - I stripped a Hasegawa F-16 a while back (iffy Twobobs camo <_< ) that had Alcladed exhaust over a Mr. Surfacer 1000 primer and it was pretty much unscathed. Eventually I loaded on the cleaner, let it sit a while and REALLY went to town on the Alcladed areas just to see how much abuse it could take, and the result was just a sort of worn look.