I am not a pro modeller or an amateur…if there is someting I don’t understand about modelling, it is brass…what is the deal with brass?
I read FSM and in the pictures i see brass replacing plastic. Once painted it looks the same as plastic. So what’s the point of wasting money?
I can’t find brass easily or wait for it to become prepared just for my model…
someone has to explain why we use brass.
I rather agree with you–I rarely use brass at all, and have taken many, many top trophies at regional contests.
The one advantage brass has is that it bends pretty easily, but is also very strong. So it has its value in certain applications. YOu can solder it and provide strong joints for key areas.
But a lot of brass that I see is entirely unnecessary IMO. I think it just makes a pretty picture for WIP photos? [:-^]
PE brass is another mattter entirely. If you understand the processes that make PE, a lot of fine detail parts can be made that would not be possible in plastic. I do use brass PE, but don’t always use all the parts. Again, here a lot of the stuff is sometimes unnecessary, such as the jack details on armor kits
I’m a 1/700 ship and 1/72 airplane guy, and have never used brass sheet or shapes for any of my efforts - it’s just too difficult for me to work with. However, I have used brass rod at times for masts and cargo booms, for the simple reason that it doesn’t bend. Few things are worse than the feeling you get when rigging plastic masts and watch them start bowing in various and unnatural ways.
Brass, especially photoetched brass, will get you closer to a true scale representation of an object than is possible with injected plastic or even resin.
Photoetched brass details are available in thicknesses in the order of 10 thousands of an inch (0.010") or less. Details may be relief-etched in that material to approximately half that thickness (0.005" -). Consider an ammo can or tool clip which in 1:1 would be made of 1/8 thick material (give or take). In 1:35 scale the thickness of that part should be 0.004 inches (+/-). You can’t get to something that thin with injected plastic technology. The limit is about 1/32 inch or roughly 10 times too thick.
Ship railings, radar arrays, and lattice masts are another case. Even they may be overscale but thay are closer than what can be done in plastic.
It is beyond the capabiliites of injected plastic to mass-produce parts with extremely fine tolerances
I’ve yet to see anything better than brass for reproducing the cooling jackets and mechanisms on the Spandau & Vickers machine guns used on WWI aircraft.