Bishop Hobbies

When I decided to model my Yamato for it’s last sortie – I found that I needed several deck edge AA turrets as well as some parts that had become lost. No turrets were available anywhere so I decided to cast my own. I went to TAP Plastics and got the stuff I needed. I used their silicon RTV mold making system. A little pricy, but once you have the stuff you can do quite a bit of casting. First you need to make the mold. I took one of the turrets I needed to duplicate and put it in a small plastic box that I had lined with double stick tape on the bottom. Then I mixed up the mold solution and put it in a paper cup. The cup was taped to the edge of my workbench over the container which I placed on the floor. I cut a small hole in the bottom edge of the cup so a thin stream of mold solution would stream into the container. This method will keep air bubbles from forming in the mold. Once the solution has emptied into the container – let it set overnight. Then remove the mold from the container and the turret from the mold and there you have it!

Then you just need to mix up the casting solution and pour into the mold – wait an hour or so and you have your new part. This is the really simple way to cast parts without using a vacuum container. The mold won’t last forever and there is a real limit to what shape of parts you can do with this, but it worked really well for the stuff I needed to do.

Here is a pic of three molds I made and some of the parts cast from them.

Here is a pic of the mold rtv and casting resins I use.

You gotta have tools to build models – so here we have some of the basic stuff. Left to right we have:

A right triangle – handy for lots of stuff from getting a nice 90 degree angle, and also as a cutting guide.

Sprue cutters – to cut model parts from the plastic sprues. You want to have a nice clean cut when you remove the parts – it makes for less work later. Don’t go twisting parts off of the trees – that’s a good way to break stuff.

Next on the right is a steel ruler to – well to measure stufff. Comes in handy at times.

Then we have an old eraser shield – good as a cutting guide or to scribe curves and stuff into plastic.

Above that is a package of #11 X-acto blades – the blade of choice of many modelers me included.

Nest on the right is my pin vise – used to hold small drill bits to drill holes with.

Then next on the right is an X-acto knife with the venerable #11 blade. I go through these blades on a regular basis. I just got a package of 100 on e-bay for a very reasonable price. I use the X-acto knife to trim parts and scrape mold lines off of the parts. This is a really handy tool and it gets used a lot. One note here – these blades are very sharp – I can’t count how many times I’ve cut myself. They can really slice and dice you and should never be used by young children without really close supervision.

Last of all are two types of tweezers to grab stuff.

Sometimes you gotta drill holes in stuff so here we have our basic drilling tools – from left to right.

• Hobbico quick drill set (with storage case) – very handy to drill holes in all kinds of stuff.
• My pin vises – two shown here.
• And last is a package of small drill bits.

Here is a pic of some stuff I use to clamp parts:

Here is a pic of some of the types of tape I use to tape parts together, and to mask off parts for painting. You want to use tape that doesn’t have a lot of stickiness to it as that tends to pull off underlying coats of paint. The Tamiya tape works really well for this, and comes in a variety of widths from 6mm to 40mm. You can buy refills to fit into the dispensers to cut cost.

And last but not least – first aid – actually I was trying to be tongue in cheek here – but it is serious business. I can’t remember the number of times I’ve cut myself with my X-acto knife – those things are really sharp. So keep some bandaids handy and while you’re at it know where your first aid kit is too.