linclogs

I used Sugar Pine for my molds. Not easy to find - not in the home supply stores like Home Depot or Lowes. I got some at a specialty lumber supply store. Sugar Pine is very clear and light. It's a popular choice for professionally manufactured pine molding and for folks that do wood carvings. Forget using the lumber you find in the home centers. I tried several types of lumber from them and they were always too hard and not clear grained enough. Sugar Pine carves and sands extremely easy. I coated my molds with 3 coats of polyester finishing resin, sanded between coats. It's easy to tell where more sanding is needed - look for the "shiny" (low ) spots and sand the surrounding (high ) area more until the spots are gone. Of course, this is assuming the mold is pretty much perfectly shaped BEFORE you start the resin coats. Also, sand the last coat with very fine sandpaper. I used wet-or-dry 220. Water won't hurt the wood once it's sealed with the resin. Any sanding marks that can be seen in the finished mold will probably show up in the parts, so the mold has to be really smooth.

One mold I made from Douglas Fir and it had heavy grain in it. Even though the mold was perfectly finished and the resin coats were perfectly smooth, you could see the woodgrain pattern in the finished canopy. I'm not sure why but I suspect it had something to do with the different colors of the woodgrain acting differently when heated up. So stick with woods that are very soft and fine grained (or nearly non-detectable grain ). Never tried balsa. But someone said balsa was not a good choice. Don't know why not. Don't know why it would matter if finished with the resin anyway.

One word of caution about polyester resin. That's the stuff that's extremely dangerous to use. It comes with a part "B" to mix with the part "A". The part "B" is a small bottle of thin, clear liquid. You count the drops when adding to the part "A". It's not an equal mix like mixing epoxy. But the dangerous part is they say take care not to get the stuff in your eyes. It's said it will turn your eyeball into a hard, brown lump before you can ever get it washed out. And the damage is permanent, as in "non-reversable". So if you mess with that stuff, wear eye protection.

Other safer types of resin could probably also be used but I never tried them. I know the polyester type was easy to work with (and safe once it was cured ).

You fellas that are trying this for the first time, post some pics of your re****s. Many modelers are always posting questions about "where can I get this cowl or this canopy", etc. If they knew how easy it was to make their own, they'd know where to get those obscure, hard-to-find parts. And once you have the mold, you can make as many as you want of the part. Nice when you have to do a repair job and can't find the molded parts anywhere to buy.