Attached are photos from a FSM build article of Tamiya 1/48 Betty: builder Carmine Mari. The gent has taken a scalpel and some sand paper and given some extra articulation to the wing panel to better simulate the “stretched skin” that was such a revolutionary improvement starting from the late 30’s. I think the results are very interesting. But as is sometimes the case with an FSM article you get: “Carmine did this, check photo 3” and little information on what was done. This is the case here. (Any subscriber on the forum can check out this article in the archive: it’s from 2008 “Build a Better Betty.”) Anyway, I’m not really sure what’s going on: is he scraping along the panel lines and then sanding them down? If anyone has tried anything like this, some advice would be nice before wrecking one of my wrecks trying to get it to work.
Not real sure that I’d want to rescribe a whole plane. If nothing else I’d feel like a dope for getting rid of a lot of older kits with raised lines. Might take a crack at it with a practice kit: the effect does look good. Then again the model I’m working on now is so old it’s half scratch built.
