Cleaning White metal kit components

Yeah, but why?

It’s easy to think that your kit is new, so everything in the box is also new and ready to be put together, this is often not the case with metals, I will only refer to white metal here.

White metal is a process that can leave alot of impurities, surface imperfections and sometimes detail errors that can all be corrected with a few minutes with a few files, various sandpaper grades, soft and hard sanders and fibreglass pens.

In the pictured example you can see the difference with this DJH O Scale boiler. I have started with some fairly coarse grit (about 240) soft sanding sponge and removed alot of the rough surface, finishing with about 1000 grit sponge (I wet sand the very last step) to shine the metal. The detail was ok on this piece, having a set of fine chisels comes in handy for sharpening edges of the boiler bands (for example).

Cleaning around details can be tricky. Here I prefer to use a sharp fibreglass pen (I prefer the fibreglass pens and refills from RS).

The result is a far cleaner model, your solder or glue will take much better, so will the paint. I always keep cleaning a model after each step right through assembly.