I have heard that you can use toothpaste to polish the canopies of aircraft. Is this true and how is it done?
Yup, it’s true. Get some toothpaste that contains baking soda and just use the paste as a rub, wash well afterwards, let dry then dip in Future.
will baking soda-less tpaste do the trick?
Yes and no:
You need a ‘bad’ brand of toothpaste. Good toothpaste will not sand that well. Good for your teeth, but it will take forever to polish your canopy. I use Tamiya polish paste, which works just as well (on the model; not for brushing teeth; although I never tried).
hehehe… i spose u could get a whole line up of different polishes outta different toothpastes .[:D]
ive heard that the stuff old ppl use to clean their dentures is particularly coarse…
For something faster than toothpaste, you can use nail polishing sticks. The one I have has three surfaces and it did a super job with some canopy modifcations. Basically I ground out the inside of a 1/72 Spitfire’s canopy hood, so that it would be thin enough to look good posed open. After sanding with various grits of sand paper, I used the three surfaces of the polishing stick as well as little swatches from each surface wrapped around a toothpick to get into the corners. Once I was done with the polishing stick, I finished up with tootpaste, although I don’t think the toothpaste really did anything. A dip in Future and the thing looks perfect.
That’s kind of weird. Two toothpaste-canopy topics. Sorry about that[:P]