Making antenna wire from piece off frame....

Modeling Subjects Aircraft
1

Hi guys[8D],

This has been asked before, but could someone explain to me how I can make an antenna wire from a piece of the frame of a kit.
I’ve already tried it, but the palstic melts to quick…
Could somebody help me?
I know someone posted a pic of this technique, but I forgot to save it on my computer…

Regards,

Jürgen

2

place the sprue close to the flame when you’re starting, gradually move it away as the plastic starts to stretch. the thinner the plastic, the farther away it is from the fire.

3
  1. Cut a long peice of sprue
  2. Light up a candle and hold the sprue over the candle
  3. Start pulling the sprue apart immeadatly. When it streaches to a desired thinness, pull it away from the flame.
  4. Cut off the section of thin plastic you need
  5. Super glue/plastic glue it to the anteannas with a bit of slack left (it should sag just a bit)
  6. Put a flame from a match or lighter under it for just a second and it should tighten up.

Someone on the fourm has a drawing demonstrating how to do this. Hopefully they’ll see this topic and post it.

4

Very interesting… but do you know a way to attach this antenna wire to the fuselage/wings/stabilizers like the SM.79 Sparviero has?

5

I stretch sprue as follows:

With a piece of sprue a minum of 3 inches long and a lit candle

  1. hold sprue between thumb and forefinger of each hand about and inch to an inch and a half above the flame.
  2. immediatly start rotating the sprue back and forth between your fingers while keeping it directly above the flame (this seems to spread the heat on the sprue instead of concentrate it at one location on the sprue which leads to burn thru)
  3. if you’ve got the heigth correct, the sprue will not melt, but soften (kind of sagging). At that point, quickly remove the sprue from the area of the flame and begin stretching it.
  4. with practice and experimentation, you will find that you can vary the lengths and thickness of the resulting product. If you stretch very quickly, you will get very long, thin pieces of stretched sprue while if you stretch it very slowly the results are a shorter, thicker piece of stretched sprue. It just takes practice.

zeroenna - couple of suggestions - some people just attach the sprue to the surface where it’s supposed to enter with CA - you can also drill a very small hole (#80), angled the direction that the sprue is to go and again attach the sprue with CA