Do yu guys sand teh wheel seams off on model soft skin vehicles. Hopefully this is clear I ma not sure whether the seam is meant to be there or part of the molding.

Good question. I leave the seam on the spare tire, but use a sanding stick medium grit on the wheels themselves. Depends on how you wish to portray the model--new or worn.
DJ

Padrino - I clean the seams - even on the spare tire. I do this because mostly I display my models in competition. In reality, a new spare tire would have seams, but tends to look out of place on a worn and beaten vehicle. In miniature, the oddity is often magnified if you don't place the model into a scene to help explain why it's there.

The quality (knowledge and experience) of judges varies wildly - you never know what you'll get. So, I remove the manufacturing leftovers and by-products (seams, gaps, ejector pin marks, short-shots) for construction sake, and not so much for historical sake. If you're not going to enter it into a competition - then do your own thing!

Gunnie

On mounted tires I definitely remove the seams as they do wear. I will also wear down the tread on differnt tires on the same vehicle. On spare tires it will vary. If tires are vinyl I would remove it (as much as possible, some will remain) as they are often excessive, on plasric tires you have to differnt views above. I do not build a lot of wheeled vehicles, so not a lot of experience. On tanks, I may leave some road wheels with a slight seam, they are there on real thing and depending if the road rides on rubber padded track on bare metal, would affect wearing of those seams. One thing I do do on vinly tires is to lightly sand the side walls to get rid of the excessive shine of the vinyl. There are exceptions, depending on vehicle you are reproducing. I use to be common practice on jeeps belonginh to commanders for teh drivers to clean and shine the tire side walls when in garrison, even though there is an Army policy against it. The shine materials would increase rubber wear.

Unless you intend to do an out of the factory vehicle, all vehicle will wear down those casting seams rather quickly. A tool that I've come to love is the Flex-I-File. Basically a 'U' shaped peice of metal that you attach different grit of sanding strips to. When you press in on the open end of the'U' your able to sand round contours. The above mentioned sanding sticks are fine as well if you've got financial conciderations. one tip there though check the beuty Isle at you local drug store they sell similia stuff for buffing nails and they are a bit cheaper.

Josh Weingarten
aKa shiryon :-)