Professional Novice needing help/advice

Out of curiosity, what kind of glue are you using?  If you're using tube glue, that may be one of the issues.  Best thing to do is align your seams and use liquid cement (Tenax 7R or Ambroid Plastic Weld work best) along the seam.  Capillary action will draw it along the seam and slight pressure will literally weld the two surfaces together.  Do it slowly, a few inches at a time and your seams will see a 100% improvement.  It cures rather quickly too. 

Jon

Hi snoopy . I'm in exactly the same situation as you . I spend a huge amount of time puttying and sanding , re-puttying and sanding on all of my builds . It is fustrating and certainly takes the fun out of building kits . However it's something I've learned to live with . Most of the time I do loose panel lines that intersect where fuselage seems are glued or where wings fit against the fuselage , and usually I don't bother trying to reproduce any of them . Mostly I make sure the putty is smoothed out nicely and aim for a nice airbrush paint finish . I realize that this doesn't help you that much but I'm sure a large majority of plastic aircraft modelers are in the same boat . None of my finished helicopters or fighter jets are perfect but it's the best I can do and I'm happy with that . Good luck with your builds and just keep persevereing , thats what I do . Kind regards John

One of the biggest problems I have always run into is pin mis-alignment.  I found that if you sand off the locating pins on the Monogram AH1S the fuse halves line up perfectly and you will only need filler at the tip of the nose and the bottom belly just aft of the aft skid tube. I have built a bunch of Mono Cobras, so I know its not just a fluke on one. My Italari locating pins never fit right. I jus sand them off and then lighly clamp the parts after applying liquid glue.  Im not much of a clamper, I find that my rubber bands or tape wick the glue away and down the fueselage, or the Berna assemblers twist parts, or my hobby clamps crush the plastic, you name it. I will use padded worn out clothepins on the tailboom and maybe up on the nose, and some weak clamps around the doghouse if needed, but not much. I just get better results with low clamp pressure. I WILL tape the inside of a fueselage seam if i can get in there, like on any Dragon 1/35 egg or cobra where I can drop in the cockpit.

The other half of this is, with many kits, dont do the whole fueselage at once.  Do JUST the tailboom and let it dry over night and then work the rest of the fueselage into place, that way you dont have too muich going on at once.  Italari's cobra designs are like this, so flimsy due to the entire upper pylon being a separate piece. And, somtimes one half is longer than the other and you have to work around it as well,  maybe taking a slice out to shorten it (tailboom joint is a good candidate, dont remember which kit it was but I had to do that once).

 another thing that i often do is back up myparts with glue tabs. the big blackhawk has a caved in belly. I added .040 tabs and chunks of old credit cards to the inside of the fuse seams to help stabilize it and add strength. glue them up on one side and let them dry,and then glue the halves together adding glue to the tabs so the surface area of the bond is increased. Vacformers do it for strenght and it helped on the big 'hawk. I also ran a piece of tube down the TRdrivshaft housing as I have experieced cracking and failures here, having the tubing in there gives about 500% more glue surface to keep that from splitting.  maybe its just me but before I started doing that they would split out on me.

HTH

David

Hi Snoopy,

Maybe the clamps your using are too strong. I had this problem a few years back when I started building again. I used clothes pegs but found that they were too strong and infact pushed the parts together too much forming a ridge instead of a nice smooth join. I use the method described by Jon and use super glue, but a bit at a time. Only apply the glue from something like a toothpick, never from the tube. Just press and hold then move on to the next bit. Always dry fit first though to make sure everything lines up.

Rich

Snoopy,
I fix this problem by cutting off locating pins and gluing very short sections at at time by using a good liquid glue......let the short section cure fully before you move on to the next.  This will prevent the "rush" job needed to do the whole thing at once.  Granted, it takes a lot longer, but I'll bet that the extra time it takes to glue the fuselage will be offset by the time and effort saved in not having to putty and sand.....

I use MEK as a glue....Methyl Ethyl Ketone....it's a primer that plumbers use on PCV pipes (get it at a good hardware store).  It's really cheap (1/10 of the price of Tenax or something similar) and it dries extremely quickly.