It's raining today so I did a little sanding. Here's a photo of the left fuselage half after removing most of the flash. You can see a little pigtail of material on the edge, a sign that you're just about at the correct sanding depth. From this point on you have to use a very light and even pressure on the part so as not to go too far:
A couple of shots of test-fitting of the two halves after sanding. Notice that there is a tiny bit of a gap at the vertical fin/fuselage juncture--I still needed to touch up the top of the vertical fin to finish this part of the process. On larger parts it is sometimes difficult to uniformly sand all the surface at one time because vacuform pieces are usually a little bit more flexible than their styrene molded cousins.
The same process, this time on the horizontal stabilizer halves. I usually start by sanding the entire half as a unit, keeping it on the sandpaper with even pressure (providing that the part doesn't have dihedral, of course).
After getting through the flash it's time to fine tune the process. For this part I sand only the left and right halves of each piece individually so as to get a uniform leading and trailing edge thickness.
And here are the two halves after sanding and finessing.
You can see from the last photo that the trailing edge is still a bit thick. With careful sanding you can achieve a knife-edge on most vacuform surfaces, especially on a Koster kit. In this case I'm going to be cutting the elevators and trim tabs loose from the stabilizer later and I'll finish the thinning of the trailing edges then.
More later,
Scott
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
. She's been put on a "doggie-diet" since then and is back down to a little less than 75 pounds. She was tipping the scales at around 84 when that picture was taken........ 
