Question on working with white metal

[aferguson]

I'm toying with the idea of opening up the bomb bay doors on my Corgi B-24. If it were made of plastic it would be easy......i'd just score where the doors are etched into the model repeatedly until i cut through the plastic and the doors fell out.

I can do the same technique with the metal corgi model, but i've never tried cutting into white metal to this degree before. I know white metal is pretty soft, so i was going to use an exacto knife blade or a box cutter blade to do the scoring.

I don't want to discover after six hours and my fingers are bleeding that i'm 1/4 of the way through one of the doors, however.

So my question is......how much effort will it take to cut through the white metal? It's about 1/16 of an inch thick as near as i can tell.

[Epap]

While I've never tried cutting through white metal, I've had no difficulty bending this substance back into shape---as on some of the Altaya bi-plane models. However, I don't think that the project you have in mind, AF, is going to work out well----though I wish you luck, of course. Suggestion: rethink the whole idea.

[cnq]

I'm toying with the idea of opening up the bomb bay doors on my Corgi B-24. If it were made of plastic it would be easy......i'd just score where the doors are etched into the model repeatedly until i cut through the plastic and the doors fell out.

I can do the same technique with the metal corgi model, but i've never tried cutting into white metal to this degree before. I know white metal is pretty soft, so i was going to use an exacto knife blade or a box cutter blade to do the scoring.

I don't want to discover after six hours and my fingers are bleeding that i'm 1/4 of the way through one of the doors, however.

So my question is......how much effort will it take to cut through the white metal? It's about 1/16 of an inch thick as near as i can tell.

Good luck if you decide to do it. I would be very afraid to do that on an expensive model.

[aferguson]

i bailed on the idea....lol. Mostly because i think it will take hours upon hours to cut through the 4 bomb bay doors. I think the idea is workable, but would no doubt end up looking somewhat crude. So i did some battle damage (a few bullet holes, a bit of flak damage) and weathering instead....