"Cleaning and sanding resin." Topic

I picked up some 15mm tanks week, and they're lovely. Resin models, with metal bits to be glued on here and there.

(Don't know what kind of resin; it's very light, and very slightly flexible. Holds detail well, but it's not as crisp as some of the hard grey resin that I've worked with in the past, like the old Kryomek tanks.)

Started cleaning them last night, and I've run into a problem. There are striations across a lot of the surface areas, almost like woodgrain. Obviously an artifact of the mold that they were cast in, and easily removed with a bit of filing and/or sanding…except where it isn't, like across the hatches or other detailed bits. I can file those flat and remove the tiny grooves, but I'll be removing detail as well.

Any tricks that I can use here? I've found that very lightly scraping the edge of an X-Acto blade along an area can remove enough resin to to the trick, so that works with *some* of the smaller areas…but again, I don't want to risk carving off any of the details.

There's also a little bit of pitting here and there; I'm planning on using Squadron putty to fill those, but is there something better for this purpose?

First wear a mask and have good ventilation . Resin is nasty in the lungs as a fine dust

Sounds to me like they were cast from prototyped models which weren't cleaned up prior to molding. The striations sound suspiciously like the stairstepping artifacts you often get with lower resolution outputs – especially with how it goes across details.

Maybe try steel wool. I use this on resin models where I have to sand away filler.

Damon.

I'd wet sand them with steel wool or wet-sand paper 300 or better grit (600 grit wet-dry sand paper works well. Did you get them from Micropanzer?

they seem to have been moulded from a 3d print.
saw some of these 3d printed models in 28mm and they looked awful, looks like the stratified layers in a rock.
it would be impossible to get rid of if they are into the detail that much.
so much for 3d prints being the future!!!!!!!!!!

3D prints don't have to look like that, and a great many of them don't. I've had some excellent prints. As Todd said, this sounds like something printed at low resolution and poor quality control.

Shouldn't ever have made it to being a production master.

They don't have to, but many do.

I agree with captainquirk.

The manufacturer should've had them printed to a higher resolution, cleaned them up before making masters of them, etc.

I've heard in some cases that you can spray with a good quality auto primer, a bit more heavily than usual, in order to fill in some of the striations. Again though, you'll be risking covering up other details.

At this point, I'm working my way around each of the three models, and I'm just…slowly…removing the lines. A pain in the butt, to be sure, but not an enormous one.

What's the best way to deal with the pitting, though? Putty, or superglue? That's a really minor problem, in only a few places on each tank, but I need to deal with them. Or enlarge them a bit, make them into damage.