The Little World

We all go down the aisle of the hobby shop and look for a way to spend our money…even if we don’t have a lot of it at the time.

Don’t guffaw and pretend that you haven’t done exactly that. If you’re reading this you have come home occasionally with a left-handed canopy chopper or a tube of styrene snot or some such frippery. You’ve told yourself that you’ll need it and you’ll make life a lot easier and then it has gone into the back of the modelling box for three years…

Phil Flory reviewed a Micro Scale product that he said he couldn’t find a use for. I’ve recently used it and I absolutely wouldn’t be without it. It is the removable PVA glue used for temporarily attaching parts. Micro Scale say it is good for sticking things when they are to be photographed, but I use it when they are to be painted.

It ties in perfectly with my now-normal practice of hand-painting the frames on my 1:72 aircraft canopies. I’ve tried masking them for spray painting with very mixed results. In my case it has varied from abysmal to horrid. Yet when I take to the frames with a bow pen and thinned paint I can make a good fist of even bad canopies.

But why use it? because I need to occlude the cockpits and gun pits on a lot of planes that have such complex topography there that no amount of taping and plugging will make a seal. In these cases I coat the clear canopy with one of the rubber masking fluids and then temporarily stick it to the fuselage with the removable glue.

You don’t paint both sides of the mating flange – just one side. When it is dry it is still sticky and you can press the clear part down to seal all round. The masking solution protects the canopy from overspray and colour right through the process until you put on the final varnish coat. Then you simply prise it up peel off the masking layer, and carry on with the bow pen. Once done, you can give the canopy another rim job and stick it on. They might say it’s impermanent but I reckon it will last well enough.