This is a first for these pages: a light-hearted look at the craft from a modeler’s wife.
When colourful swear words pour out of the workshop, Monika Cybulska makes tea and asks, “Everything alright in here?” One day the question came the other way. Her husband asked, “Any idea how to plug this hole?” She thought of nail gel.
Below the waterline
The problem sat below the waterline. Foil windows had left glue marks that never went away, peeled paint, and ugly ridges. He could not beat the waterproofing. UV gel is glass-clear, cures at once, and can be placed with microscopic precision. She jokes that she does not know the chemistry — photopolymerisation — she just knows gel polish under a little blue lamp lasts three weeks. That same clear resin, she writes, made “the perfect tiny portholes made from nail gel.”
A small lamp, a long history
UV curing began in 1960s industrial coatings. It reached dentistry in the 1980s, when the lamps were the size of microwaves. Then the LED lamps shrank. That is the hook. The how-to is in the July/August issue. We are not reprinting the steps here.
Monika Cybulska’s “Tools and Techniques in Scale Modeling: A Light-Hearted Look at the Craft — A Modeler’s Wife POV” is in Ships in Scale Vol. 29 No. 4. The carrier also listed it as “UV Gel for Scale Windows.” Print + digital is $44.95 a year in the US.