I am building a 1/32 F-86. It’s an old kit and has grey “nav lights” molded into the wing. I plan on cutting these out and filling them in with clear parts. Cutting a piece of clear sprue is no good, since it clouds. Krystal Klear? Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!
What do you mean the clear sprue clouds? Cutting clear sprue and attaching it into the nav light space is a commonly used technique to create nav lights.
Perhaps I did it wrong, but when I cut a shape out of the sprue, it was opaque. I suppose if I put some future on it, that would clear it up?
you have to polish out any tooling marks you make in clear styrene when you cut the pieces out
another method, for the folks that don’t want to glue clear sprue in after painting the area, is to file the light area a bit smaller, then either paint the clear color, or paint the light color and then clear coat it, building up the thickness back up in the process
another option is to search for the colored lights, sometimes they are already being made by someone
A search for your aircraft type at a place like Hannants will turn up the Quickboost lights if they made them for your aircraft. If not, there are also some universal color stock pieces by Quickboost that can be filed to shape, polished up, and then glued in place.
So far, I just thin the area down, paint the color, then cover with the same clear color.
Rex
I sometimes paint the pigmented styrene lights with a silver or aluminum color, and then when that is dry applying red and green from highlighter markers. Looks okay in smaller scales.
Thanks for the inputs, guys.
Here’s what worked for me. I cut out the recess for the nav lights. Then, drilled a small hole in the middle of the recess, where I painted the Tamiya clear red or green, respectively.
I then cut a small piece of clear sprue and, holding it with tweezers!, used a ligther to melt the sprue. (Not too close or it will fire up and turn smokey colored). While it was melted, I squished into the recess. Let it cool, then sanded and polished it into shape. I didn’t even have to glue them in.