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Scribing Made Eezee?

The eezee method

It may just be me who finds all these problems when re-scribing, I have read of a modeller who reckons to be able to re-scribe the most complicated model in just a couple of hours. Well I can’t do that but I’m quite prepared to do it over several sittings. What tends to happen though is that I get bored and frustrated because of the time it takes and because of the difficulties that can be found. The model is then put away, sometimes never to see the light of day again.

It was while trying to get a piece of Dymo tape to conform to the compound curvature of my B-26 that one of those blinding lights of inspiration struck me. I was determined to finish scribing the sucker because I wanted to write this article on scribing. The trouble was things weren’t going to well and I could see the B-26 getting shelved. What I needed was something that had a re-positional adhesive, was flexible enough to follow a compound curve and was thick and tough enough to allow a metal scriber to be traced along side it.

The first 2 requirements are easy, masking tape, but there is no way you can use it to scribe against, or can you? Well no, if you are thinking of the likes of Scotch magic tape or 3M, which is just too thin.

What about Tamiya tape? It certainly fulfils the first two criteria, I use it all the time for masking, it’s great, but its paper, surely it wouldn’t stand having a metal scriber running down it’s length, would it? Yes it does, well it does as long as you are careful, and I’ll explain the procedure in a moment. Suffice to say that after discovering that using Tamiya masking tape, in place of other straight edges, I finished re-scribing my B-26 Marauder in just 4 sittings, of about an hour each. A bit of a record for me, it may have been only 3 sittings, but the memory is going so I’m leaning to the side of caution.

What to do

Using an auto plastic primer, of a contrasting colour to the plastic of your model, spray all the parts that need to be re-scribed and let it dry. Scrape off the panel line you wish to re-scribe, using a curved blade, a number 10-scalpel blade is ideal. When scraping off the raised line go carefully so as to only remove the line. This will leave the plastic colour showing through the primer, as a contrasting line.

Lay a piece of Tamiya masking tape on a piece of glass or tile and, using a steel ruler and a sharp blade cut a length about 2-3mm wide. Place this piece of tape along the line to be re-scribed, I use 2 pair of needle nosed tweezers to position it.

Now the part that requires a little care, but is actually not very different from the usual method of scribing, using a metal straight edge. What you must remember is that the Tamiya tape is paper, it’s quite strong - but it is paper. So if you push your scriber against it with any force it will cut into it. I have found that the best scriber to use with this method is an Olfa-P cutter (see pictures). The blade is a little big but can be ground down, which is something I keep meaning to do to mine. The blade will remove a hair of plastic, which is exactly what you require.

The trick is to apply very little pressure at the first pass, let the weight of the knife do the cutting. This is just what you do when doing this by conventional methods. Make another pass, again letting the weight of the knife apply the pressure. With this or maybe another pass the blade will be guided by the scribed line and will not be dependent on running along the tape. I was surprised to find that I was able to scribe the whole of one upper wing using only 3 pieces of tape. The tape will deteriorate but you can use both sides of it. Actually using this method the process of re-scribing is so, relatively, quick it’s almost enjoyable.

When I first began to re-scribe the wing I fully expected to conclude that, on flat surfaces, the conventional method would be the best. This proved not to be the case because positioning the tape was so easy. The re-positional properties of the adhesive account for this.

Even more interestingly the third piece of tape was used just once, to scribe the panel line around the tip of the wing. This is a little trickier and using the coffee can sealing foil might be a better way. I did this as a trial and as you can see it worked. There is no other way of doing this, with any success, other than making a template.

The Olfa-P cutter was not used here, it is difficult to control around a radius like this. I used another, purpose made, scriber but it tended to ride up on the tape, with care I managed a satisfactory result. I timed myself on one of the bottom wings. This required the use of one of the Verlinden templates, but I still managed to re-scribe the entire lower wing in less than 28 minutes. This highlights the difference for me, I would have normally expected to have needed several sittings, managing only 2-3 lines a time. That’s the real difference, seeing “fast” progress and wanting to stick with it.