PALIGHT

GUIDE TO WORKING WITH FOAMED PVC

Foamed PVC 'Palight' is a specialist rigid sheet material.

It has numerous properties that lends itself to model making applications:

• It is very strong and durable without being excessively heavy.
• It is considerably lighter than sheet styrene yet more robust than foamboard.
• It is waterproof and more warp-resistant than foamboard.
• 1 & 2mm Palight can be easily cut with a scalpel, 3mm is a little trickier to cut.
• It can be sanded or carved and can also be inscribed or even embossed to create different surface textures (see our Modelmaking Guide).
• Palight can be painted without any danger of warping (though it will usually require priming first).
• It is not affected by heat (within reason) from strong lights making it an ideal material to make larger scale sets for stop motion animation.

Palight is best glued with superglue, this gives it a very strong bond.

We recommend Zap green (or the medium equivalent) which is thin enough to spread on the surface and not create a gap when sandwiched. It also has the benefit of filling the gaps (if any) when adding detailing strip etc.

Applications include: Stop motion animation sets, architectural model detail, scratch building RC body shells and wargaming scenery.

We have just introduced 3mm Palight this month (February 2016) and it is currently on offer at 10% its eventual selling price.

EXAMPLE

In this example, by Mike Lees (Theatre Designer), we show you how you can create a wood effect finish into a backdrop of an animation/theatre set model.

1. We have used 3mm Palight as the backboard and 2mm for the wooden panelling.

The strip, to make up the detailing around the door and inside the panelling, is 2mm styrene quarter rod and 3.5mm styrene half rod.

The wood panelling was cut with a Scalpel and strip with a Fine tooth saw.

2. To make the panelling, a suitable sized section of 2mm Palight was first scraped with a Finger Sander. 'Grain follows length' almost always for any realistic wood construction.

The areas of the baseboard which would remain visible as panels were also scraped, then the frames were stuck into position using dots of Green Zap.

3. For the paint finish, We used diluted Citadel base Zandri Dust. It took several light coats to cover the superglue.

We then used a coat of diluted Citadel base Rhinox Hide then a dry brush of the same colour just to pick out the grain.

Finally we finished off with a liberal coat of Citadel shade Agrax Earthshade to add tone and a glaze.

FURTHER INFORMATION

You can download our guide to using Palight, written by David Neat, master model maker & author of ‘Model-Making Material and Methods’.

In the guide David shows the versitility of Palight through three different model making applications.

Working with PVC foamed 'Palight' (2.8Mb PDF).