Starship Modeler Discussion Forums

Or, if you can, wet sand, preferably under a running stream of water (just enough to keep the resin wet). You can do it over the kitchen sink, but it's uncomfortable after a while. Alternatively, you can use a plastic pan (like a cat's sandbox) filled with water and a sponge. You sand a bit, soak th...

i've got a million and one things i could use those little beauties for, but my Soldering Fuu is waaay too low. :cry: You can practice on the cheap by tying strands of human hair around the necks of fleas*. When you can just tie it easily, you may proceed to the half-windsor. Then the windsor, then...

You can even use plaster to make molds for resin—all you need is an original with no undercuts, and an acrylic-based demolding agent, which can be airbrushed on. If you use good plaster and stir it gently so you don't get bubbles, you get really clean castings, comparable to silicone rubber.

Kylwell wrote:

OdysseySlipways wrote:Kylwell said:

Anything involving a lot of pressure goes on the cutting mat

fingers, hands .............

Yup.

Then straight into the ice and off to the hoppital.

Cutting off the toes?

Just be careful with the dust you may kick up, it's bad for you: wear a mask (like a surgeon's mask) while you do it.

...I *have* to do one of my own; my wife uses the exact same inhalers for her Asthma, and I have dozens of them squirreled away. I'll just use a different Chris Foss paint scheme. :thumbsup: As long as you don't give the poor dear an angora cat or some similar hairy beast so you will get the 'empti...

A good technique to get evenly spaced coils is to wind two wires together, then remove one of them. You'll end up with an evenly spaced spiral, in which the coils are one wire diameter apart (or 2, if you use 3 wires and remove two, and so on). The best bet is to use solder as the core, as it bends ...

Sorry, lost track. Well the phaser-like device used a plastic tape made of thick PVC (I think) with a vinyl backing to protect the adhesive. That tape is Dymo tape. It's very thick, so you can use it as a guide for scribing. Its adhesive is not all that strong if you don't rub it down hard or keep i...

You remember those old school self adhesive embossed letter labels? The ones used to label everything up until the 80's (and laser printers)? The ones that were "printed" using a remarkably phaser-like device (my dad would have to tell me time and again that it was "not a toy"). ...

And about the 'superglue with fiber' thing, better use white (PVA) glue. You just wanna hold the fiber in place, no need for extra-strength glues.

Padawan v 2.5 wrote:Remember, let it soak about twenty-four hours (sorry, I don't know the metric time conversion charts) and stir or shake the parts occasionaly.

K

Twenty-four hours (metric) turn out to be about one (imperial) day.

Glad to help.

I collect stuff (mostly greeblies from all sorts of things), but I also like to collect bigger shapes, like deodorant, shampoo and other kinds of polypropylene/polyethylene bottles. I have a problem with paint/primer sticking to those plastics, and thought of a solution: Bare-metal foil. It adheres ...

How thick is the casting? What cures the resin is the heat produced by the catalyst. If you have a part which is too thin, the will not be enough heat buildup to cure the resin all the way through. Conversely, if you have a massive, solid part to cast, it may overheat and crack as the heat built up ...

Bar wrote:Holy moses!
This thread is now OVER THREE YEARS OLD!!!
Bar.

Had to go back and check. By my Liege's many-tentacled visage! It's true!!!

Bottoms of beverage cans — very thin.

Do it in layers. Drill, paint the silver, paint the clear green, put a bit of epoxy down, let it set in a (concave) meniscus, then add—with a toothpick—some white glue (the kind that dries clear) because it tends to make a convex meniscus as it dries. Hopefully, one will offset the other.

Can you gain access to one of those guillotine paper cutters? Not the sliding knife type, but the guillotine type, with the big heavy thick lever-type blade. That ought to do it.

I believe tile caulk has some anti-fungal chemical or other to make it less susceptible to mildew (at least some around here have it). Another potential problem is that there are many silicone caulks which work with acetic cure, meaning they output a strong vinegary smell as they cure (and for quite...

Caution, though: MEK, or methylene chloride is wonderful in gluing plastic, but extremely dangerous to work with. It is mutagenic (therefore cancer inducing) and can be absorbed either through the skin or the lungs (as you breathe the fumes). Exposure is cumulative, so go easy with it.

Again: 'Tis the season to be jolly! Because Christmas ornaments are just so good for that warm greebly feeling inside... Specially now that most new stuff has gobs of LEDs. Candy also is a good source of nice greeblies. LifeSavers have now a little metal (aluminum?) ball filled with—I dunno, three o...

Are you going to use single LEDs for each porthole or flooding the interior with diffused light? Any way you look at it, I would suggest using gels (in the theatrical lighting sense—a colored transparent material to tint the light, cellophane even). This way, you can get the right color for each ind...

All I have is boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff.

You need a "pulley-like" object (a "wheel" with a semicircular groove cut into it—this groove has to have the same internal diameter as the external diameter of the rod being bent) to bend the rod around, because a flat, cylindrical former will flatten the inside of the curved rod.

Maybe if you cast the barrel in white metal, you'd get good results. The setup for the mold is very similar (you have to get high-temperature rubber, but everything else is the same—or almost), and as the white metal is not "sticky" and it is very heavy, it will conform beautifully to the ...

Was the part already cast in clear resin you say? Ideally—and that's what I 'd do—the resin should be translucent (that can be accomplished by adding small amounts of filler—ground-up calcite—to the resin), so the whole volume of resin diffuses light. Also, even though the overall price is a bit gre...

If you simplify first:

1/100 ÷ 1/144 = factor of multiplication

Dividing by a fraction is the same as multiplying by its inverse, so:

(1/100) x (144/1) = 144/100 = 1.44

You can get rid of calculator's rounding errors.

I recently found a line of Chinese-made gift bags (just like the ones given out on fancy stores, the kind that folds flat and opens to look like a box with straps as handles). The kicker is that they're made of thin plastic (I suspect polyethylene) with a finely detailed, raised honeycomb pattern, r...

This is getting ridiculous. I have to get going and organize this collected (yet thoroughly cleaned with soap!) pile before it takes over my house. Time is running out. I'm not sure how much longer the defences around the "Ye Shall Not Touch These Spare Parts Boxes" area will hold.... It ...

Ti Raven wrote:(where is an umlaut when I need one?)

Here, you can have this one.

ü

I'm not using it right now.

We all collect stuff, scrounge stuff, "salvage" stuff from the garbage, buy "potentially useful" neat doodads ("Truly, honey, this whistling bubble blower will be really useful back home, whenever you're feeling down, just blow and wheep , here come the bubbles to make you s...