Modeling in plastic can present a problem when the parts are very thin and easlily broken. Would coating the weak area wit CA strengthen the part, or do you have any other ideas that would accomplish the same thing? Thank you for your suggestions and comments.
Adding a “candy” coating doesn’t necessarily give a part strength. When possible and practical reenforcement should be internal. Whether it means drilling a fine hole the length of the part then inserting a wire or rod insert. Or the use of some form of external plating.
CA doesn’t provide any torsion strength. So if a part bends or twists, more than likely the CA coating will fail. But if you mix it with something else such as I described above, you’ll have strength and durability.
Specific methodology much depends on the engineering challange at hand. There is no one answer.
In many cases the best solution is to replace the part with one made out of some other material. And that frequently isn’t particularly difficult.
One problem that sailing ship enthusiasts, in particular, face pretty frequently is that, though styrene plastic is a wonderful material for many purposes, it’s a lousy one for other purposes. It’s a good idea, for instance, to replace the plastic eyebolts in a sailing ship kit with wire ones. People who’ve grown up on plastic kits sometimes have a bit of a phobia about working with any other medium - but they shouldn’t. You can crank out a couple of dozen wire eyebolts in ten or fifteen minutes, and, secured to the model with CA adhesive, they’ll easily withstand the yanks on the rigging lines that would promptly snap the original styene ones.
There are also some parts that just can’t be reproduced accurately by the injection-molding, two-piece-mold process that’s normal in the plastic kit industry. A two-piece, rigid mold physically can’t produce a block or deadeye with a hole through it and a groove around it. (The geniuses at Imai figured out a way to make superb deadeyes with “slide-mold” technology some years ago, but that company went out of business shortly thereafter.) The solution is to either make your blocks and deadeyes from scratch, live with the somewhat inaccurate plastic ones, or buy aftermarket replacements. (My favorites are the britannia metal ones from Bluejacket. Britannia metal doesn’t have to be injected into the mold under pressure, so the molds can be made of flexible rubber, which can handle undercuts.)
Styrene isn’t the best material for long, skinny objects that need to be rigid - e.g., masts and yards on a sailing ship. Quite a few modelers replace plastic spars with wood or wire.
The bottom line, of course, is that it’s your model. My suggestion is that every modeler “think outside the box,” and use whatever materials he/she feels will accomplish the job best.
Jtilley, what I am thinking about is the little eyes at the ends of Revell’s Cutty Sark and U.S. Constitution blocks. They seem very vulnerable. Do you see a way of strengthening them?
I built both those kits several times quite a few years ago, and I don’t recall many, if any, problems with the eyes on the blocks breaking. I have, however, heard horror stories about the quality of the styrene in the kits Revell has been stamping out in recent years. It might indeed be a problem.
The solution really depends on how deeply you want to get into the details of rigging gear, because the two kits use identical blocks and those of the real ships were quite a bit different. The kit blocks are fair representations of blocks with rope strops - such as were sometimes (not always) used on board ships of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (like the Constitution). If you paint the block black (or maybe dark brown, to represent oiled wood) and the strop (i.e., the eye and the raised band around the block) the color of rope, you’ll have something that looks quite a bit like a rope-stropped block (a pretty good-sized one, on 1/96 scale). Not all the lines of the Constitution were made like that, but it’s a pretty safe assumption that a lot of them were.
A more time-consuming approach would be to trim off the eye and the band around the block, file a groove where the band was, and make your own rope strop. If you’re going to do that, though it makes more sense (unless money is a major problem - as it is for most of us) to buy aftermarket blocks.
If you want blocks that really look like those of the Cutty Sark, the best approach probably is to buy aftermarket iron-stropped blocks. My personal favorites are the ones from Bluejacket: http://www.bluejacketinc.com/fittings/fittings3.htm .
A full set of blocks for a tea clipper from that source won’t be cheap - but there’s no reason on earth to buy all of them at once. My normal practice is to order as many as I figure I’ll need in a couple of weeks, and order some more when I’ve used up about 75 percent of them. But I won’t blame anybody in the least who thinks spending that kind of money is overkill. There are plenty of demonstrations in this Forum that a model rigged with Revell kit blocks can be mighty impressive.
Hope that helps a little. Good luck.