The Little World

For the people my age, this is the title of a Vincent Price movie that will scare the pants off you. My take on it may scare you away from your modelling bench. But not me…

This is red modelling wax. Also known as base plate wax. It’s used in a dental laboratory to establish the basic shape of a plastic denture. You heat up a sheet over a bunsen flame and fold it in two. Then press it into the palate of a plaster model of a jaw. The two-layer thickness is the average for full dentures. Later in the process it forms a cavity in a mould that is heated up until the wax runs away, but until then it can be carved, flamed, and smoothed very easily. It was the first dental material we worked with as students in preliminary lab work. some 50 years ago. It hasn’t changed.

The good thing about it is the fact that you can adjust the amount of softening and sag with the heat you apply and the wax need not stick vigorously to the surface underneath it – though it can conform closely to it. This is going to be the property I depend on as I experiment with it as a painting mask. You cut it with the wax knife – A in the picture.

The idea will be to use it to form a mask for the standard British A-B aircraft camouflage pattern on 1:72 models. You can do this by any number of means but they all have a drawback of some sort; the simple tapes and rubber cement solutions leave a hard edge to the pattern and the rolled Blutac sausages and paper masks are complex and fragile. I am ideally looking for a masking material that will have a soft edge but conform to the compound curves of the fuselage/wing interface. I hope to be able to carve the swooping British pattern on the model itself with a LeCron carver – the silver tool in the picture. It has a smoother blade than the wooden-handled wax carver.

The critical point will be whether the wax leaves a residue that interferes with the next coat of clear varnish or if it reacts with the initial coat of paint. Here’s where the $ 13 Mustang will be valuable…but not too valuable, if you know what I mean. I’m going to perfect the technique before start painting $ 60 bombers.