Crystal-clear canopies

Modeling Subjects Aircraft
1

Another question for the experts;
When you make your own crystal-clear canopies, is all the detail on the inside of the new canopy? If it is, how do you mask and paint?
Steve Gorder

2

Looks like nobody makes their own canopies, huh.

3

I don’t, sorry no one answered your question for ya. I haven’t gotten to the whole canopy painting step yet. So I’m not much help either.

4

sorry dont make my own. the closest to that for me will be vacuform am canopies.

joe

5

I use low tac masking tape cut to frame width to define where the frames are, mask as usual (parafilm is what I’m using now, but I have used white glue, Tamiya tape, etc.), carefully score the mask along the edges of the masking tape “frames”, remove the masking tape, and burnish down the mask. That worked really well on an AJ Savage canopy, which has a lot of frames.

6

Steve,
I’ve made a number of canopoes, either vac-formed (into a female mold or over a male mold) or stretch formed (over a male master) - it usually takes a fair number of shots before I’m happy with the result - and I’ve usually done this for WWll subjects - they tend to have fairly simple canopies and framing.
I usually use decal film to mask simple (like birdcage Corsair, P-47, Texan, Dauntless etc) canopies - spray the interior color onto the sheet, let it dry, then spray the camo color (OD or whatever) over that - this way you see the interior color from the inside and the exterior color from the outside when the decal strips are applied.
Then I cut the decal film into strips - I often tape (or clamp) a couple of No.11 Exacto blades together with a spacer in between, then use a straightedge to cut a strip to the correct width. I lay one down onto the canopy (or several) that run parallel - let em dry, then run the strips perpendicular to those, trimming to length as needed.
Then I just touch up with the exterior color wherever it’s necessary. It’s a little fiddly, but more “in scale” than having huge raised canopy frames which would scale up to being about 4 inches high.

7

Thank guys. Just wanted to know how popular they were and how well they worked.
Steve Gorder

8

I was unclear at the start of the discussion. I meant stretch-form instead of vacu-form or crystal clear canopies. Only took me a couple of weeks to figure it out! Smart.
Steve