Plastová destička 0,25 mm

A thin white sheet for skinning

A quarter of a millimeter is the thickness at which comfortable hand work begins. The sheet is still thin enough to be bent over a cylinder without heating or pressed onto a rounded fuselage, and yet it already holds its shape and does not ripple while being glued. The thickness designation comes from thousandths of an inch, and ten thousandths give exactly those 0.25 mm.

The material is the same styrene that kits are molded from. That means it is joined with ordinary liquid cement for plastics, sands the same way, fills the same way and takes paint the same way. It is cut with a scribing knife: make several light cuts along a ruler and then snap the sheet along the score. Trying to cut through the sheet in one pass ends with the blade wandering.

Typical uses are skinning and patches, infills for bulkheads, floor plates, doors and hatches, plates, the walls of buildings on dioramas, repairs to missing parts and making templates for masks. At the edge the sheet can be sanded away to nothing, so that the transition to the surrounding surface cannot be seen.

The range of sheets covers thicknesses from roughly a tenth of a millimeter to two millimeters, and black and clear variants are available in the same steps. A thicker sheet holds its shape by itself, a thinner one follows the surface beneath: for skinning rounded fuselages and cowlings this size is exactly right, while for load-bearing structures reach for a thicker one.

Do not throw the offcuts away. Narrow strips make excellent stiffeners, spacers and templates for repeated cuts, and a larger remnant will serve as a pad when cutting small parts. Thin material moreover levels with its surroundings faster once glued in than thicker sheet does.