Fuselage to wing seam--filling sanding and

[Allan]

Hi fellows,
One thread the other day asked us to tell what part of modelling we like best.
I hate sanding, particularly the fuselage to wing seam.
How do you fellows do it? I really get pissed off at losing the surface detail when I use sand paper. The fingernail polish remover and putty trick doesn't seem to work. Tamiya putty and Mr Surfacer 500 are okay, but I'd love to use something that makes sanding easier. I've even tried using white out--not so good but easy to sand.
Maybe thinned white glue is the answer?
How do you fellows do it?
Allan in Canberra

[NARSES2]

Must admit it's my least favourite part of the process as well Alan. I use plasticard shims if the gap is biggish (like on an Airfix Metero !) and find I can work on that without effecting much of the other detail. Otherwise if there's a lot of detail I don't want to use then I use Miliput. Although you have to mix it you can smooth it out with water a remove the excess before it drys

Chris

[Andrew Gorman]

I've protected  adjoining detail with a few strips of sticky tape, and even made carved to fit sanding blocks out of balsa.  Lately, I've just started using Aves Apoxie Sculpt which smooths very nicely with a wet finger and cures to styrene hardness overnight.  Nice stuff, and not expensive.  In general, any work you can do to improve the fit BEFORE you glue the parts together is 1/10 the work you'll have to do after.
Andrew

[noxioux]

I'm too eager to do any pre-fitting, but that's a really good idea.  What I usually do is a combination of shimming with card and filling with either bondo glazing putty or grey milliput.  I'm starting to get a hankering to try that apoxie sculpt, though.  Milliput is a bit of a pain.

One thing I just got turned onto was this Tenax 7R stuff.  I got a jar of it when I couldn't find any Tamiya Extra thin at the hobby store.  What I found was that when joining wings, fuselages, etc. . ., the stuff dries so quicky that I could join a small section at a time, making sure that the fit was nearly exact.  It saved me a huge amount of sanding and rescribing on this 1/72 B-47 I'm working on now.  I had hardly any filling to do on the model at all.  If nobody's tried it before, I'd recommend you give it a shot.  I kinda like it, but the taste is a little funny. . .

I despise raised details (mostly), so I almost always have to rescribe panel lines, so I don't even sweat lost detail.  I just figure that's going to be part of the entire process.  While I haven't gotten to the point where I enjoy rescribing detail--I'm getting there slowly!