Scriber alternatives

[Ace-Garageguy]

Also a BMC line chisel, again Japanese.

[SfanGoch]

52 minutes ago, Ace-Garageguy said:

The guy's name is Paul Budzik. I posted the vid below.

Believe it, or not, he's a dentist. Paul has been well known in the military modeling community for what seems like decades.

Here's his website which I had bookmarked:

http://paulbudzik.com/

[Ace-Garageguy]

Here's something interesting...the trusty backside of a broken-tip #11 blade will pull a nice curl BUT it widens the groove considerably.

I measured the width. It's .5 mm. SO...anyone hoping to get a narrower kerf with a broken-tip #11 blade is just peeing into the wind.

Scribing door and other panel lines deeper with the backside of a non-broken-tip #11 blade also has inherent limitations.

Because the tip is tapered, as you go deeper, the tip also tends to widen the slot.

To produce consistently high quality models, it's important to pay attention to things like this.

I've just been working on the bench for a couple of hours, paying very careful attention to the results (which I've never done with this level of intensity before) with these two versions of a lot of folks' favorite tool, and I don't find it to be entirely satisfactory.

[Snake45]

2 hours ago, Ace-Garageguy said:

Here's something interesting...the trusty backside of a broken-tip #11 blade will pull a nice curl BUT it widens the groove considerably.

I measured the width. It's .5 mm. SO...anyone hoping to get a narrower kerf with a broken-tip #11 blade is just peeing into the wind.

Scribing door and other panel lines deeper with the backside of a non-broken-tip #11 blade also has inherent limitations.

Because the tip is tapered, as you go deeper, the tip also tends to widen the slot.

This depends on just how much of the tip is broken. It's not uncommon for me to lose just very tippiest-tip at the end, rendering it useless for things like BMF but still very usable otherwise. 

I generally backside-scribe down until the width of the molded-in (but too shallow) groove just matches the width of the blade. That usually looks just about right. 

A real annoying problem is where the kitmaker made the panel line grooves much, MUCH too WIDE. A good example is that AMT snapper Mako Shark I kit you just bought. I also had this problem with their snapper '53 Corvette, which was tooled about the same time. All you can do with these is either live with them as-is, or grind them out completely, refill them, and start rescribing from scratch, which of course is a HUGE PITA. 

[Ace-Garageguy]

13 hours ago, Snake45 said:

This depends on just how much of the tip is broken. It's not uncommon for me to lose just very tippiest-tip at the end, rendering it useless for things like BMF but still very usable otherwise. 

I generally backside-scribe down until the width of the molded-in (but too shallow) groove just matches the width of the blade. That usually looks just about right. 

A real annoying problem is where the kitmaker made the panel line grooves much, MUCH too WIDE. A good example is that AMT snapper Mako Shark I kit you just bought. I also had this problem with their snapper '53 Corvette, which was tooled about the same time. All you can do with these is either live with them as-is, or grind them out completely, refill them, and start rescribing from scratch, which of course is a HUGE PITA. 

Yes sir, agreed all the above.

I was removing panels for opening features last night, and the X-Actos widened the openings so much I had to shim them back with .010" stock, which is also a real PITA. 

Question: The only thing I've found so far that sticks well enough and is hard and tough enough to take new scribed lines over filled areas is West Epoxy System 105 and micro. Works beautifully, even with two lines scribed parallel a few thou apart, but it takes 12 hours to set up. You have any faster alternatives?

[SfanGoch]

Try fiberglass resin with microbeads mix. Fill in the gekakt lines and it'll be ready in about two hours max. Better than CA.

[Ace-Garageguy]

Probably a good idea. I generally stay away from polyester resin in the house (other than tiny amounts of Bondo) because of the smell (though I use it extensively on the real cars), and what I find to be difficulty mixing very small quantities accurately (I mix the aircraft and West epoxies on a gram scale, and 10 grams of mixed material is about as small as I go to give me a close enough mix to ensure a full cure), but I can develop small-quantity mix tables for polyester resin with a little effort. It's trickier though, as the sweet spot with polyester catalyst is right at 1.5% of resin weight, whereas my favorite epoxy mixes at a 1.4:1 ratio (for one unit X of resin, the total mixture weight needs to be 1.4 times the first weight X)...easy to do on a gram scale. With the mix ratio of polyester being only 100:1.5, it's not so easy to do very small amounts.

Hmmmmm...

Edited November 30, 2018 by Ace-Garageguy

[SfanGoch]

I use Bondo Fiberglass Resin. You know that it's pretty forgiving when mixing small quantities like 1 oz. (I use those 30ml cough medicine dose cups). Just add 10 drops of liquid hardener and you have approximately 5 minutes work time before it gels, which is more than ample to fill in FUBARed panel lines and such.

[Pete J.]

Just made this up for a group on Facebook, but thought is was appropriate here too!