Attn Car Modelers - Help with Seams with Large Chrome Pieces !! Monogram Big T

Well Craig, my way is kinda expensive but I'd strip the chrome, glue the parts together, file/sand/ what ever it took to make the seam disappear, then send the part to Chrometech for rechroming. Anyhow, that's how I did it, especially if I was putting the car in a contest of if building for another individual.

Mike

The other way to deal with the seam would be to strip the chrome, fill, prime, and use Alclad Chrome over a black gloss acrylic base. The stuff is amazing.

True. This is how most folks I know in local clubs handle the problem. If you do not like acrylic, you can use Alclad Chrome over black enamel also.

One thing to watch with Alclad- do not get CA kicker anywhere near it. That stuff to accelerate CA setting ruins Alclad.

I agree with all of the above, i.e. for show, chrometech, for your own enjoyment, Alclad.

If you're dead set on foiling, I'd fix the seam then foil the whole thing as, at least in my experience, foil doesn't match the plated surface well enough to fool the eye when they're side-by-side

on 7/16/2008 3:46 PM OldSchool said the following:

The chrome plating on model car models is too shiny for scale anyway.

Viperdoc wrote: : The other way to deal with the seam would be to strip the chrome, fill, : prime, and use Alclad Chrome over a black gloss acrylic base. The stuff is : amazing. : And the Alclad sealer adds to the shiny factor. Pretty impressive.

Bruce

I'd say it is okay for a show car- a rod or custom. A good aftermarket chrome plating job can be VERY shiny. Not many shops do it these days, but those who do can really put a shine on it- depends on surface prep, of course. Not much chrome plated steel on NEW cars these days, though.

While I can see the arguments behind "scale colors" I don't think that shininess (reflectivity) has a scale. Think of car's chrome as a distorted mirror. If you tried to model a plain flat mirror in scale you wouldn't want to make it dull just because it's scaled down. If you did that it would no longer properly reflect light and it would not appear like a mirror. Same scenario applies to a chromed car part. If you build a model of a 50's car and dull all of its chrome parts, the model will look like a toy, not like a miniature replica of the real car.

Peteski

I was talking about chrome plating on model car trim. 1/25 scale etc. I miss the chrome on real cars. My 97 Nissan PU has chrome bumpers and grill.

I think the only chrome on my '87 Mustang other than the plating inside the light buckets is around the blue oval in the slot on the front. I can't call it a grille. Geez, I didn't even get a horsey up front.

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

I got one of those die-cast '79 LeBaron wagons recently and the chrome on that model definitely does make it look toylike. I have no idea how to tone it down to look 'real'.

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

I posted this query to Fine Scale Modeler a few years back as I agreed that chrome on plastic toys/models is "out of scale" to the subject. I believe one of their suggestions was to try a wash of smoke or some kind of bluing to soften the edge of the finish. Never tried it though..

Craig

Scale lustre (as good a name as I can come up with) is more-or-less a subset of scale colour. Think about the basis of the scale colour argument - how colours appear to tend towards grey with distance. By the same argument, lustres tend towards satin, you lose the highlights of close-up mirrors and the flatness of true matts. Certainly I would never use full matt or full gloss at 1/72nd - just satin blends, tending towards either extreme.

I'm taking about scale model cars rather than things like netural metal airplanes for example. If you were to build two of the the same very well detailed 1:25 scale model cars, one with full luster "chrome" plating and another with scaled "luster" then took photos of them in a realistic setting, the one with full luster "chrome" would look more like a 1:1 car than the one with scale luster. At least that is how I see this (from my own experience).

It is all about the reflections you see in the chrome (or in the reflectance of the paint finish). If the reflections are clear then the model looks realistic. If the reflections are soft or fuzzy (when the "chrome" is not fully reflective) then the model looks like model, not the scale representation of the rel subject).

Peteski

At 1/25th, scale effects on colour and lustre are small in any case, so I wouldn't expect anything more than a subtle dimming of very smooth chrome to be called for. Showroom finish means that extreme brightness is to be expected as well.