Softening temperature of polystyrene

gondolas to beat them up some so that they look more like the mill gondolas that I see in heavy usage around steel mills.< One of the mags had an article on how to do this a few years ago. Us the magazine index and do a search. I think it was RMC but not sure.

Around the boiling point of water, but it varies with the fillers in the plastic. Experiment with the sprues from the same kit.

One author described how he used a soldering iron to soften and dent the plastic, it took a quick swipe to prevent melting the styrene to the point where it outgassed (the gasses produced by overheated or burning styrene are poisonous.) I'd try this out on some junkers first. Outdoors. [...]

HTH

Dan, I had some badly warped resin parts in a Westerfield kit. The directions suggested putting the parts on a piece of glass and baking them in the oven for awhile. This worked and they flattened out perfectly.You might be able to do this with your plastic.Start out at the lowest setting. Some Plastics may not need much more than that as a few of my sons toys became deformed by being left in the car out in the sun. Bruce

I've seen MANY try this trick on gondolas and hoppers, an NONE of the results looked even moderately believable. Soft plastic simply does NOT 'dent' the same way steel plate does. The vastly over-thick sides on the plastic models just worsens the problem. Perhaps the use of 0.005" or so styrene sides would make for a better result.

One of the magazines recently had an article by someone who replaced the sides of a gondola with thin sheet metal, then dented that ... it looked very nice, but was a LOT of work.

Dan Mitchell ============

The British fine-scale magazine Model Railway Journal had an article where someone had built a soft white-metal ex-military Simplex switcher in a distressed condition. It was a soft white-metal kit and they'd thinned bits of the shell from inside before denting it, adding rust holes etc. It looked very good.

I don't know if thinning plastic would work, it doesn't behave like metal.