Glacier Girl

My Feedback: (4)

I know most here play with 1/16 scale but I know a few delve into the 1/6th stuff too.

I have three Armour Hobbies 250's that I'm converting to r/c for a client. The plastic they are made of is so brittle and fragile they break just looking at them.
My client told me not one of them showed up, new by the way, with out multiple broken parts. Two of the ones I've done so far required me to build new chassis' for them as there was no way the stock would hold up. Heck the ones that he's built the tops for have braces and patches all through the inside to hold the stuff together, and many of the pieces had to be hand made as the part were to bad to repair.Even the wheels, idlers, sprockets, and such had to be built as the stock ones just crumbled.

I had this weird idea of maybe trying to boil the parts, like we did on r/c cars to make them a lot less brittle.

Thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, as I really don't look forward to piecing together another one.

This is as far as he got with opening the third one to inspect it. As you can see it's cracked nearly the whole way, and that is some thick plastic. The thinner stuff is even worse.

Airbrushler

OUCH it looks like it's thick enough plastic i guess trying to boil it is worth a try as long as it don't de-form the plastic so this is after you sent the parts to your client?
how do they arrive to you are they ok, maybe the shipping people damaged them.

rivetcounter

This is a well-known problem with the Armour Hobbies Sd.Kfz.250, I also thought of RCing one a few years back but owing to the brittle plastic including tracks I never bothered, some of the very early 250’s had better plastic that stood up to shock these kits if you can find one were made about 10 years ago.

Glacier Girl

My Feedback: (4)

Airbrushler, no this is how they showed up from the sellers to my client. It's like the plastic has degraded badly over time.
I ran into a similar on a 21st Century 1/6th Stuart, only one of the probably dozen now that I've converted. The plastic cracks in some cases, in others it just crumbles, like something happened to the material. Like picking up a piece of dry clay and when you do so it just crumbles in your hands. It doesn't fracture with sharp edges like plastic does when you break it, it just falls apart like crumbs.

These "toys" get used, they are not shelf sitters by the client. He has at last count something like a half dozen Stuarts, a FOA Tiger, a Panther, Jagpanzer,T34, 3 Jeeps, 3 Humvees, 4 Abrams, a Kublewagon, and I am just wrapping up a Kettenkrad. Kinda bummed that the way it looks the 3 250s, are going to end up as some expensive battle damaged units.