Has anyone used vacu-form canopies? Are they any improvement (in general) over the kit part? Are they crisply formed, or are edges and corners soft and rounded? The only experience I have with vacu-form is a few MiniArt buildings and they can be a real pain!
1 Like
I used a lot of vacuform canopies for…card models. I also purchased a fair number for plastic models.
Good ones are very thin with excellent optical clarity, clear demarcations indicating where to cut, and drop in fit. They do not contain stress marks, thin spots, or ripples from the forming process.
Vacuforming does not produce parts with crisp edges. There will always be some degree of rounding at edges due to the nature of the forming process.
Assuming you start with a nicely made canopy as described above, the hard part is precisely cutting away the excess plastic so that the canopy fits the model perfectly. This involves a lot of test fitting, careful cutting, and light sanding.
In 1/72 and 1/33 scales, the difference in thickness between an injection molded and vacuformed canopy is often significant.
Future works on vacuformed canopies.
Is it worth it? With card models, there is no other option so…yeah! With plastic models, in my opinion, you really need to want it. Vacuformed canopies are flimsy. They are hard to clean up perfectly. They like to distort when fitted. Painting the framing is more challenging because pushing on the part, as when applying canopy masks, may cause the canopy to flex, and that may cause the part to pop out of place.
Hmmm…Thanks.
Well, Sometimes They’re good Substitutes for Kit Canopies; I built A Mach 2 P6M Seamaster and The Kit Canopy was Total Garbage; I found A Vacuformed B-52 Canopy on E bay and it worked Perfectly!
I have used them quite a lot, especially on older kits they can really offer some improvement.
However, there are drawbacks:
- Paint doesn’t stick very well to them.
- They really can’t be polished if scratched.
- They have to fit very well to the kit since they can’t be filled and sanded like an ordinary canopy could be.
Worst case is a full cockpit where it has to fit a complete fuselage, like a B-29 nose. In these cases you should start with the clear parts and adjust the rest of the kit so it fits against it.
The easiest way to use them (and the way I use them most often) is by just substituting the opening/sliding part of the glazing using the vacform parts. If you build a Spitfire, stick to the kit parts for the windscreen and the glazing behind the pilot, use vac part only for the sliding canopy. This is often a huge improvement since the injection molded thickness is most disturbing on this part combined with being an easy and low-risk operation compared to installing the whole vac set.
Magnus
Hmmm…that’s a very good idea. Thanks.
My most recent purchase was the one for the Willaims Brothers C-46. It’s a huge improvement.