How does weather changes affect models?

[nitro_force_fan]

Hey guys im thinking about putting my models out in my shop out in my garage that is not climate controlled. The summer it gets to 100 here and in the winter it gets to 30 below..........will theweather changes mess with them? Anyone know?.......Thanks Joe

[2000-cvpi]

I wouldn't do it. It's not worth the added risk of melting, cracking etc. Not to mention the chance a animal getting into the garage and eating the boxes.

[Harry P.]

I agree, not a good idea. The cold won't hurt them, but in extreme heat the plastic can warp. A better idea is store them in the basement, if you have one.

[Longbox55]

I store mine in the garage. Mine is heated for winter (heat is only on when I'm working out there), but otherwise not climate controlled. Other than one resin body getting warped (a '55 Chevy conversion cab), I've had no issues with storing not only my kits, but also all of my paints and supplies in the garage.

[cobraman]

The heat can also harm the chrome. I had it happen so I know first hand.

[lordairgtar]

I keep mine in the garage and also in storage when I had no garage. I've had nothing happen to them that I can see...on the plastic or otherwise. I live in Wisconsin. I just keep mine high just in case of leaks or rodents. Don't forget, most kits are on board a ship from the far east for an awful long time in metal container boxes above decks.

[1930fordpickup]

The heat will speed up tire burn if they touch plastic while in the box.

[zenrat]

What's 100F in metric units? 44C?

It gets to that here and then you can add on some inside my shed.

All my kits are stored out there (along with my builds) and I have had no problems due to the heat.

Just take the usual precautions - remove the decals and put them indoors in a folder and put the tyres into a plastic bag to separate them from the "glass".

In winter it doesn't get down to -30F so I don't know what that might do to them but i'd have thought you wouldn't have a problem unless it went from -30 to 100 in a few hours in which case you might get warping (although if that happened flooding might be more of an issue!).

Worried about animals getting into them? Mice can also get into a house - in fact they'll like it more in there as it'll be warm and there will a food source other then cardboard.

Worst i've had (touch wood) is ants (easilly dealt with) and large spiders that like setting up home in the opened boxes on my "in progress" table.

[mikemodeler]

I keep mine in a nice, climate controlled area and I suggest you send them to me for safe keeping! I will allow visitation and can send one to you as you need them, no charge! (Cuz I am nice guy!)

I have mine in the garage here in Charlotte and while it gets about 100 degrees or so out there, I have not seen any issues with them. The only problem I have found is that they tend to reproduce in the warmer weather as I have more kits now than I did last spring!

[Tom Setzer]

I had a couple of Resin bodies warp when I stored them in a storage building during last summer's heat! Now I keep them all inside where it is always 68 degrees!

[slusher]

l have seen models exposed to high heat and seen warped bodies and tires dryed out. my closet is full but at least they are in the safest place. Today model car parts are real thin easy to damage...

[lanesteele240]

Dont forget the decals. Wet conditions may affect them adversely

[jbwelda]

i would suggest caution and try to keep them in a more climate controlled area than out in a shed in direct sunlight during the summer (and i have a feeling sub zero or even long periods of sub freezing wont do them any good either). the problem i think will come with how they are packed inside their boxes. those kits with a zillion parts that you cant put all back into the box after you have taken them out will probably be the worst as when you repack them you can put pressure on the roof of the body or something and then introduce them to heat and they may take a set you dont like. especially if they are stored stacked one atop another and especially if the upper box fits inside the perimeter of the box below it.

[Art Anderson]

i would suggest caution and try to keep them in a more climate controlled area than out in a shed in direct sunlight during the summer (and i have a feeling sub zero or even long periods of sub freezing wont do them any good either). the problem i think will come with how they are packed inside their boxes. those kits with a zillion parts that you cant put all back into the box after you have taken them out will probably be the worst as when you repack them you can put pressure on the roof of the body or something and then introduce them to heat and they may take a set you dont like. especially if they are stored stacked one atop another and especially if the upper box fits inside the perimeter of the box below it.

For starters, 100F has never damaged any kit I've ever owned (if 100F would damage plastic, those of us who use food dehydrators would certainly have ruined a lot of styrene, given the approximately 125 degree temperatures inside most of them!).

On the other hand, a model kit left on say, the seat of your car in direct sunlight on a very hot summer day can be damaged--simply because of the much higher temperatures inside a closed car in strong sunlight.

Model kits, and even paint and glue get shipped all the time in non-climate-controlled situations (think intermodal containers, semi-trailers, even your friendly neighborhood big brown UPS truck). They get subjected to extremes of both heat and cold, and that's BEFORE you get to split the shrinkwrap. Even wholesale warehouses (or for that matter, a warehouse at the factory too!) are not climate controlled in most cases--and the temperatures at the top of those high shelves can be more than a little bit warm in summer (even the province in China where many model kits are produced is tropical in nature).

I have a lot of unbuilt kits, and even some older builds that have been in a lock-n-store for years now, and whenever I've pulled one out, it's still just as good as the day I bought it.

All that said, I have had model cars ruined from being in direct sunlight, especially if they were displayed in any sort of closed showcase. That's because if the model is in direct sun, yet encased behind glass (or even a clear plastic single model showcase), the model heats up, then the trapped air does as well, with no circulation--so it just gets hotter and hotter inside that clear but closed space. Eventually the plastic does get hot enough to soften and deform. Years ago, there was a photo that circulated regularly, of a factory built display model from Revell--their highly popular mid-1950's model of the battleship USS Missouri. Now, Revell used to issue factory built up and finished samples of new kits, each in a clear plastic display case (Model companies did a lot of that through the mid-1960's--a hobby shop could order a case lot --12 kits--ahead of release [so-called "pre-orders"] and when those arrived in their store, along with them came a display model) Back to the USS Missouri: A newspaper photographer shot a pic of a factory display Missouri, her bow and stern drooping downward, her midship sagging, supported by the display stands included with those kits. Again, sun's heat, trapped inside a clear case, in this case in a store show window which let bright sun straight in.

A lot has been said about the so-called "vinyl (Revell) tire disease". That's caused mostly by chemical action, rather than simply heat. Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) is by it's nature a hard, dry plastic, which has been around for more than 100 years. Take a scrap of PVC pipe for example (the white plastic pipe one finds in the plumbing department of just about any hardware or home improvement store) and lay it up against a piece of styrene, and there will be virtually no ill effects suffered from that piece of plastic pipe. It's when a "plasticizer" is added to PVC to make it soft that troubles can happen. Early AMT 3in1 kits (1958-60) had rather hard black PVC tires that builders had to PRESS the wheels into, and that didn't attack the styrene wheels, not even the clear coat over the chrome. But, when AMT and others began to make kits with soft, rubber-like vinyl tires, the problem of tires sometimes attacking and softening styrene started to creep in. It was not unusual to buy a new model car kit, open it up, only to find the imprint of a tire in a hood, deck lid area, or worse, the clear styrene "glass". Revell had the worst problem of all model companies, given that they concentrated on really soft vinyl tires. However, by the late 60's, pretty much all model companies were able to access PVC feed stock for their molding machines that didn't have nearly as much plasticizer in the mix, and the "tire disease" pretty much went away for the most part. However, one can experience the very same thing even today: Just wrap up a model car or even parts in Saran Wrap (or any other clear clinging food wrap, and within days, you can have ruined paint, ruined chrome (I learned that the hard way early on with AAM, when we tried wrapping up chrome parts with the stuff) costing a lot of time, and not an inconsiderable amount of money to replace several hundred sets of chrome (we went to ziplock poly bags immediately--end of that problem).

Certainly by the late 70's, PVC monomers (the plasticizers) went away in favor of other material, after a huge cancer scare in the injection molding industry. Had Dupont and other petrochemical companies making PVC stocks not figured out how to get rid of the hazardous stuff, PVC would have disappeared, it was that seriously regarded by both government and industry. But with the rise of China and other Pacific Rim countries, especially when they started producing model kits, the problem came back, UNTIL they learned the errors of their ways, just as had manufacturers here in the US. For that, and all the other reasons mentioned, it makes sense to wrap up PVC tires in poly bags (even sandwich bags work!) if one is going to store a model car kit for any length of time). Along the same lines, it makes good sense to put decal sheets into a ziplock bag as well, in order to keep humidity from causing the paper to swell up and curl.

But back to the main thrust here: In general, the extremes of weather, both heat and cold as most all of us experience them, really won't harm most of our models, either built or unassembled, as long as one keeps them out of direct sunlight in the summer. Certainly, freezing temperatures don't, absent any major putty work--and that is from my experience as well.

Long-winded, I know, but all of this comes from my years of experience in storing both unbuilt kits and finished model cars, some of them for a decade or more, and in Indiana, we experience both extremes of heat and cold.

Art

[1930fordpickup]

Thank you for the information Art .

[zenrat]

Nice essay Art.

Tyres have given me a few of problems.

I've had the plasticiser eat paint off of painted rims, Tyres eating through paint on adjacent builds and tyres sticking to varnish on shelves as the plasticiser reacts with it.

Tyres eating paint it easilly solved - don't paint the inside of rims and make tyres don't touch the build on the shelf next to it. The varnish issues I solved by lining my shelves with cut up instruction sheets. But not until a couple of builds had left wheels behind when I picked them up.

Incidentally, if you soak vinyl tyres in brake fluid it will draw out the plasticiser making the tyres shrink & harden. Solid tyres split as the outside shrinks more than the inside but 1/25 hollow tyres can be shrunk down to a scale 10 inch diameter - usefull for building minis & trailers, just leave them in the stuff until they are the size you want and then rinse them off.

[jbwelda]

yeah nice essay art. i dont think i mentioned a specific high temp like 100 degrees...but in a storage bin out in the sun it gets pretty darn hot when the outside ambient temp starts going over 90 and especially if there are some windows to let direct sunlight in and no air circulation devices.

also you failed to address my real point, which is, factory packed possibly no problem but once the kit has been rifled i often find it doesnt fit like it did and then the high temp combined with stress and pressure from kits stacked above it WILL warp bodies and parts. what i guess i am saying is your chat there differs from my empirical experience. and i tend to try to err on the side of caution. agree on models left in the sun and esp in display cases and also inside cars on sunny days (greenhouse effect) but we were talking about long term storage and again i tend to rather be safe than sorry.

[Tom Geiger]

When storing cases of models in your garage, never place the cases directly on the concrete floor. It's easy enough to find used wooden pallets to have air circulate between the cases and the concrete. I do the same in my basement.

It may also be best to buy cheap plastic tubs to seal the kits inside. Kits are so light even the cheapest onces would work. That would seal out vermin. I've had mice in my garage, they can squirm in between your garage door seal. I had silverfish damage (chewed boxes and direction sheets) in my attic and even termite damage on kit boxes in a bedroom closet back when I was a kid in my parents home. One winter when it was very cold, I had squirrels chew through my attic air vent to get inside.

[Guest G Holding]

Biggest issue with heat...long term exposure will make plastics brittle...sorta like PVC pipe down south...the pipe gets brittle and will shatter

[Ace-Garageguy]

A little more.....sustained high humidity will rot and destroy many flexible synthetic materials. I'm sure Art can give us the chemistry lesson as to why. I left several large-scale vintage Tamiya kits in the basement when I was on extended assignment for a couple of years. The basement stays at about 65-68 deg. F, but the humidity is always relatuively high if I'm not home to ventilate it.

To shorten the story, when I decided to re-start the big-scale projects, I found that all my Tamiya tires had flattened, distorted and become gooey and brittle. That sounds contradictory, I know. Anyway, they're all ruined and I'm looking for replacements. Very sad.