Starship Modeler Discussion Forums

Your part only looks to be about 1/4" thick - that means your mold will only need to be about 1/2" thick or so - plenty of flexibility in there to pop the part out of the mold.

Make a thin ring of plastic on the larger surface of the ring, the part it's resting on in your picture. Then add a wider ring on top of that. You're essentially creating a ring with a T-shaped cross section. How's that for unmolding? I think it would work if the ring was thin enough, because the w...

Look at the way I make some of my parts - http://www.modular-models.com/Bee/interface%20800.JPG http://www.modular-models.com/Bee/single%20cargo%20800.JPG http://www.modular-models.com/Bee/passenger%20pod%20parts%20800.JPG Make a thin ring of plastic on the larger surface of the ring, the part it's ...

You can heat the tubing with your soldering iron if it's a small piece and you just briefly touch the iron to it. You can also do it with a cigarette lighter or even a hair dryer if it's powerful enough.

Wire - stay with something in the mid-20's gauge. That's thin enough to run through most models but still heavy duty enough to handle higher voltages. Get both stranded and solid - stranded for threading thru slots and grooves, solid for laying down a path in a larger kit and having the wire stay in...

Try a bottle of brush-on Dullcote. Put a layer on a piece of clear sheet, let it start to dry. Before it's fully dry but not while fully wet - somewhere in that "gel" range - lightly touch a sponge to it to create an "orange peel" texture. With luck, it should look the way you ne...

Are you trying to re-create that exact shot? You're going to need to put it on some kind of display stand anyway so combine your efforts. Use two clear rods coming out of the exhausts into the base, then use Tamiya clear orange and yellow to paint the flame effect onto the rods where needed, leaving...

Plan ahead, then back up and plan further ahead. Start by cleaning up the parts and making molds of one of each front and back wheel & tire as is. That will give you the ability to cast more if your attempts to drill out the ones you have go wrong somehow. Secondly, it will give you a way to bac...

Pat likewise told me he was inspired by my original concept from about 10 years ago - http://www.zizolfo.com/family/john/mode ... booth.html

Hit Michaels or AC Moore and go to the sculpting section. They have various meshes of screen there in small packs of 2-6 sheets at about 5" x 7".

IIRC, that light right has incandescent bulbs for the clear lights, not white LEDs - whites were still experimental when that kit came out. You're going to hit the whole model with dullcote when it's finished, right? Problem solved.

As long as you re-seal the connections with tape or shrink tubing you can extend or shorten the wires as needed. For the sake of keeping track of what you're doing, do literally one wire at a time - don't cut a whole bunch at once and hope you'll remember which ones they match up to because you won't.

I don't use any release coating but a lot of my parts are very small so they come out of the molds fairly easily.

What kind of mold is it - two part, envelope, open face? What's the pot life of your resin? As far as eliminating air bubbles, start by mixing your resin slowly so you don't introduce more air. Also try pouring it very slowly if it's a slow pot life. When I pour smaller parts, I hold the stir stick ...

For parallel, you don't need to literally run separate leads for every bulb/LED back to the power source, you can create a "bus" system. http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6112/6238051338_cf72de0dd9_z.jpg Connect each one to a common pair of leads within the nacelle, then just run two wires ba...

I did it once on an old Millennium Falcon by dipping a q-tip in dark grey and then "striking" it across the surface of the kit the way you strike a match to light it.

Rotocasting is only necessary if you're trying to make a large part with no seams on it aside from where the mold splits. If it's going to have edges and mating points where two or more pieces come together to form the whole, you don't have to rotocast it, just do each piece as a normal mold.

I haven't tried it but people have said that as long as the MM are totally cured you shouldn't have a problem. I think crackling comes in when you're in a rush and apply one over the other too soon.

How big do these need to be? You could literally construct them from Evergreen strip and quarter round.

http://www.evergreenscalemodels.com/Str ... l%20Strips

http://www.evergreenscalemodels.com/Sha ... er%20Round

Rubber molds allow you to do undercuts and complex surfaces because the rubber can flex away from the finished part when you take the part out of the mold. A metal mold (steel, aluminum, whatever) can only do shapes that are essentially convex without any undercuts. Injection kits are done with stee...

Did you design the parts with molding/casting in mind or was this an afterthought? Depending on the shapes and angles, it may mean tearing some of your work apart or re-engineering it to fit together differently to make the molding/casting process easier. And as Joe said - pictures. We're a visual c...

Try Testors Liquid Cement. I use that almost exclusively for all my styrene work except when I need structural stability on thin supports, then I use CA/superglue. Also, try positioning your part first, then just dab a tiny bit of glue to the edge with a toothpick. The part is so small that "ca...

I wouldn't call myself a "professional caster" this early in the game, but from my own experiences so far, it looks like your problem may be that the vents you have aren't big enough to allow air bubbles to break through the resin to get through the vents. I've found that anything smaller ...

http://www.harborfreight.com/1-5-hp-58-psi-compressor-and-airbrush-kit-95630.html Well, there's an airbrush and compressor package - $100. To answer your original question, it depends on the size and detail of your project. My logic generally goes... small kit - spray can large kit - spray can lots ...

http://www.chienworks.com/~aramisangel/sw/index1.html

Try the direct page. Hit Sound, then "Other" by mousing over the logos.

http://www.chienworks.com/~aramisangel/ ... gflyby.wav

http://www.chienworks.com/~aramisangel/ ... sxwing.wav

Found in a Google search

I picked up mini table and chop saws from Harbor Freight. The table saw uses a 4" blade, chop saw 2" blade. http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6125/5922671691_0d5c896011_b.jpg http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6008/5923236780_0c6ae3bf01_b.jpg They worked OK as is, but I modified them by building ...

para - you just use two sheets, one in each bay, and then wire them in parallel through the body.

Yep, that's what it's for. Depending where you get it and the way it's designed, you may have to build your consoles to have the screen area recessed a bit so that you can have framing space to hide the wiring connector. Don't do any major design/construction on your consoles until you have your EL ...

The only trick with pulling the clay off will be not distorting it. Beyond that, it should work although you might have to do a little cleanup of the surface depending how porous the clay.