I'm currently building the Airfix 1/24 scale Focke Wulf 190 A5/A6. It is an old kit dating from the 1970s or early 1980s and hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, been newly tooled or upgraded but it is still a very good kit. In comparison with Airfix's modern releases in 1/24 scale, namely the de Havilland Mosquito and Hawker Typhoon, the FW190 and the other kits of the 1970s and 1980s in this scale fall behind but in their day they were the best in the industry.
Superdetailing is not my aim but I still wish to go a little further with my FW190 model than an OOTB finish. For a model of its size the parts count is somewhat low. I have bought after market guns and seat belts to enhance the model. I plan to leave wing panels open in order to display the guns underneath. There will be no problem here as the said panels are tooled separately. However, there is another panel that I've opened up myself, which is the quite large equipment access panel located on the port side of the rear fuselage. On the real aircraft the panel in the side gave access to some of the radio equipment, oxygen bottles and the aft fuselage tank. I got the idea to display this panel open on my model after seeing period photos of the real aircraft showing mechanics at work with the panel open. The panel hole is large enough for a man to easily pass through it and it is known that some pilots carried their ground crew in the aft fuselage when heading west to escape Soviet Forces in the last days of WW2. It was cramped enough for one man but some FW190s carried two or even three men in the aft fuselage. According to Ospreys FW190s Aces on the Eastern Front book, one FW190 pilot shot down a Soviet reconnaissance aeroplane over the Baltic Sea whilst carrying his mechanic.
I hadn't tried cutting out a panel on a model before and knew I was taking a gamble. One thing I had read about was that I should firstly use a sanding tool to thin the plastic behind the panel that was to be cut. This meant there would be less plastic to cut through, therefore making it easier, and also the edges of the panel and surrounding fuselage that would be visable would be thin like the skin of the real aircraft.
Having used my Dremel tool to thin the plastic I then went on to try and cut out the panel with a hobby knife, using a brand new sharp blade. Unfortunately, I was still unable to cut out a clean, crisp edge as I'd hoped. Of particular problem was tring to follow the curved lines of the panel at the corners, a task that is difficult to do with a knife. When I place the cut out panel door against the hole, as if to make it closed, and holding it against the light, there are gaps showing. I've tried various ways of correcting it, including modeling putty and placing a thin plastic card inside the fuselage overlapping the edges to get the right corner curvature but these have not been sucessful. Although the mistake will not be so obvious with the panel door modeled in open position it is a situation I'm far from happy with. I messed it up once and paid for a replacement fuselage part but I did it wrong again. Buying a replacement part is not cheap.
Can anyone advise me on how to cut out aircraft panel lines, especially as in my case where there are curved corners please? Are there any special tools to do this? Thank you.
By the way, I wanted to add a couple of images to this post showing my panel access but was unable to do that ; my images are on a file on my personal computer, not on a cloud based source.