Fixing vacuum formed transparencies

[VMA131Marine]

I recently bought, sight unseen, a Fonderie Miniatures 1/48 Halifax kit. The kit came shrink wrapped so I was fairly confident it would be complete but worried about the condition of the vac-form clear parts as I remember there were damage issues when the kit first came out.  The kit provides duplicates of all the transparencies so I hoped at least one of each part would be usable.

 

Sure enough, one of the tail turret transparencies was somewhat crushed as were both of the clear nose parts. One of the nose transparencies also had white stress marks in the plastic.
 

Then I remembered something about plastic having memory. If you heat it up it will return to its original shape. With nothing to lose I heated some water to just below boiling and dipped the damaged tail turret in briefly, not even for a second. It looked better so I did a couple more quick dips and pretty soon it looked as good as the undamaged one.

I did the same with the the two nose transparencies and both of them were quickly back in shape and the white stress marks disappeared as well.

The key is to get the water hot enough and to do quick dips. I was actually surprised how good the parts looked after I was done; you can’t tell that they had been partially crushed. They really were unusable when I started.
There are probably limits to how much damage is recoverable using this method, but if you don’t have an alternative to replace a damaged vac-form clear part this is worth a try.

[janneman36]

Great tip🏆 really something to remember..

 

cheers, Jan