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Tricks for scribing round detail in fuel tanks?


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Awesome tip. Trying to scribe those small circles is difficult for me using a template. This sounds much better. As a matter of fact, pretty much every tip from Hawkeye is golden. His tips and techniques for doing things seem to be some of the best around. Thanks Gerald!

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Hi,

I use mostly aluminum tape i.o. dymo. For your problem I would tape a template with the correct diameter circle on to a piece of aluminum tape place this on a piece of glass surface and scratch around the circle with a needle until the circle falls free. Now you can stick the piece of aluminum tape with the circular hole on to the appropriate position on the tank and scribe away! I do this with square or elliptical panels also.

Hope this helps.

Pierre

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Awesome tip. Trying to scribe those small circles is difficult for me using a template. This sounds much better. As a matter of fact, pretty much every tip from Hawkeye is golden. His tips and techniques for doing things seem to be some of the best around. Thanks Gerald!

Thanks! Sometimes we tend to over engineer things when simple methods are actually more effective. We forget that many of the new gizmos weren't around back when...we used what we had to accomplish the task.

The US spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop an ink pen that could write in zero gravity...the Russians used a pencil!

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As per Hawkeye's suggestion I use 'punch' biopsy tools to make round holes. These are used by your doctor to remove a small circle of skin to send away to pathology rather than doing a larger removal. They are available from 1mm up to 8mm and are available from medical suppliers and maybe your local friendly doctor.

I am a GP so have access to them!!

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Sharpen the ends of various diameter metal tubing, press and twist to put the circle onto the the surface.

Or you could use these:

http://www.hlj.com/product/HSGTT-35

http://www.hlj.com/product/HSGTT-36

Review here:

http://modelingmadness.com/scotts/accessories/tt35.htm

Not only can you use them as punches, you can also use them to scribe circles by twisting on the surface

I use mostly aluminum tape i.o. dymo. For your problem I would tape a template with the correct diameter circle on to a piece of aluminum tape place this on a piece of glass surface and scratch around the circle with a needle until the circle falls free. Now you can stick the piece of aluminum tape with the circular hole on to the appropriate position on the tank and scribe away! I do this with square or elliptical panels also.

This is a good tip. Sometimes those stainless steel templates are difficult to wrap around complex areas of a model. With dymo or aluminium tape, you can actually 'stick' it on the surface & scribe away.

To piggy-back on this question, how do you guys scribe AROUND the fuel tank/drop tank. I actually thought of getting one of those tube pipe-cutters & instead of cutting through the drop-tank, just move the drop-tank around the sharp cutting edge until the desired panel line is produced. Any one tried this?

Pipe Cutter:

http://www.trygrs.com/image-files/pipe-cutter.jpg

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To piggy-back on this question, how do you guys scribe AROUND the fuel tank/drop tank. I actually thought of getting one of those tube pipe-cutters & instead of cutting through the drop-tank, just move the drop-tank around the sharp cutting edge until the desired panel line is produced. Any one tried this?

Pipe Cutter:

http://www.trygrs.com/image-files/pipe-cutter.jpg

Last week I got one of those pipe-cutter, did a test with one of the tanks and the results where pretty good!

It is a little bit tricky because not all the fuel tanks are completely round :boohoo:

I will show you the results with some pictures I took yesterday.

Basically this was the solution I was looking for, something cheap and easy to scribe that missing detail.

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