I recently have started building airplanes again (after a long break), and I have a few questions about making these as accurate as possible. Most of the kits I'm working on are from Minicraft (mostly 1/144 prop-driven airliners, with the 1/200 Spruce Goose thrown in). A lot of these kits have panel lines that cross seams (and the ocassional glue boo-boo) - the depressed lines should be easy enough to fix after seam filling, but what about the raised lines? How in the world to I fix those?

The short answer is, you can't.

There are modelers out there who actually sand the raised lines off and engrave all the panels on the model with a scribing tool. I've tried that once or twice and ruined the model, so I gave up on it long ago.

Well there are two ways I know of. First if you scribe the line with a needle or back of your #11 Exacto blade you actually will be creating fine raised lines on either side of the scribe. You simply do not clean up the scribe and paint over it. Sometimes it is very passable. I like to take stretched sprue that is approx the same diameter as the line you are replacing. Take a length longer than needed. Dip it in super glue and lay it over the area you are trying to replace the line in. Join the ends of the sprue with the ends of the panel line that is still intact. Trim accordingly and viola, restored line. If it is a little big then finely sand the new area to match the older part of the line.

Cheers,
Max Bryant

Now you know why most of us aren't fans of raised panel lines.

Here's what I do (though, it's rarely necessary these days): take a piece of tape and lay it with the edge running right up against the panel line. Take some thick primer (or thinned glazing putty) and paint it along the edge of the tape at the panel line. Pull up the tape and it will leave a ridge at the panel line. Not perfect but pretty good.

Brent! That's genius!

How about this - I have a friend who likes to keep a small jar of liquid cement with sprue meted in it. He uses it as a kind of a "liquid plastic" filler. Using your method, one could mask off the line to be made, and paint on this "liquid plastic" mix. That way, the new panel line would be actual plastic.

Hm?

See, enough people put their heads together, and you get a nice big pile of heads!
http://www.inpayne.com/smilies/unsure1.gif

John, for a short while, my local Target had a modeler's glue from the Super Glue co. -- it's basically MEK and polystyrene resin. It takes a while to set up, but it's a great filling glue. I might try it with Brent's tape trick.