Hi. Am currently working on Dragon's Elephant model and am putting on the Cavalier Zimmerit kit. Ran across the front bow piece in the kit and see that it's a tad bit warped. Now I've heard that putting a warped piece of resin in boiling water and then straightening it out till it cools will pretty much fix the problem, but can't remember just how long a person is supposed to leave the piece in the water before taking it out. I would guess that the longer it's in there the more flexible it becomes and I don't want to leave it in there too long and have a part that acts like a rubber band when I take it out.

Anybody else out there tried this method of straightening out resin parts and how successful it is?

Thanks in advance, and take care, sgirty

On top of the boiling water you can do it wit an hairdryer. I personally prefer the first, because the heating of the part is more uniform. For what concerns the time you need to dip the part in hot water, it actually depends on the type of resin. Dip it in the water and from time to time test when it gets soft enough to get the new shape.
Ciao

once you have the part the correct shape hold it there and cool it off rapidly in cold water. This will help reduce the 'memory' of it's old shape.

There is another method I heard of but haven't tried is to put the piece the oven at 200-250 degrees on a protected cookie sheet. For how long I can't say., but the popular answer seems to check on the piece every 15-20 min. Then when soft enough form it the way you want and weight it down in the form you want and let it cool on it's own. Cooling quicker may crack it. I know alot of the ship builders do this with the hulls of the ships when the bows are warped.
HTH.

The way you heat the piec doesn't realy matter :
- boiling water
- microwave oven
- hair dryer
- over a flame
...
You only need to heat the pice until it becomes soft enough. Then, you bend it and give it the right shape until it's cold !

I've used tap hot water for warped pieces. If that's the really thin application of Zimm, I'd be very careful about the amount of heat. In fact, if it is the really thin stuff, I'd tack it down at one end and apply tiny amount of superglue at intervals until it was flat.

Hi. Thanks for all the good advice. The piece is actually quite thick, as it's the entire bow plate with the zimmerit coating molded on it. Anyway I thought the boiling water method would be the best to try so I put the piece in a cup full of it for about 5 mins. and it worked real well. Straightened out quite nicely with a little weight on both ends. If I had it to do over again I wouldn't leave it in the water near that long, as it was real 'rubbery' when I took it out. But this is what experimenting is all about. Right? Once it had cooled down I found that part of the upper lip hand bowed out too much, so I heated up another cup of water and just put that end in it for only about 15 seonds. And that was enough time for it to heat up enough to move that part of the piece back down to line up as it should be. Just have to remember that it's doesn't take much heat to 'lossen' this stuff up to be flexable.

So this worked real great. Thanks again.

Take care, sgirty