Lexan body cutting techniques

[Short_Bus_Kustoms]

I am having a helluva time cutting out my Pandora Rc body and was wondering what other methods/ tools people use to cut out these bodies so smoothly.

[HumboldtEF]

For bodies with circular wheel wells I like to use a lexan compass like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GO0eywwBQk

Do you have lexan scissors (curved and straight)?

I find I'm able to use the curved scissors in a few useful but unexpected ways. One thing I'll do with them when I need to get in a trim just a tiny bit of material and the straight scissors just aren't able to get started, I'll use the curved portion to get my cut started (and the finish it). I'll do this even if the cut I need to do is straight, curved scissors will do a nice straight line if you keep your eye on your marks and so long as you dont do a full snip and just cut 1/8" at a time. Also make sure when you do this that you stay in the cut and dont back it out or you may end up with a jagged cut.

I've also had good luck cutting some curves that are much tighter than the bend on the curved scissors by cutting the lexan at an angle to the lexan. When you just cut straight the scissors get in the way as they occupy the space as you cut, if you instead angle the scissors and at the same time hold apart the 2 sides of your cut you can cut much easier and much tighter curves.

More complicated cuts sometime require that you take an xacto blade and score the cut (just a slight cut, dont go all the way through), then you'd bend and snap these pieces off. If this cut is not somewhere that you can just bend lets say a window for example you would cut from center of the window out to the edge or close to the edge of your score marks basically creating a bunch of little triangle that you can grab onto and bend, bend these at the score mark and they should just snap off. If you search youtube for "score and snap lexan" and you'll find some videos.

[QuesoDelDiablo]

I hate scissors personally, they always hurt my hands trying to cut plastics.

I score the cut line with a sharp razor knife (go over it a few times to ensure the scoring is nice and deep) and then crack and peel to remove the trimmed portion, super easy and works really well for tricky/round corners.

Dremel tool or sandpaper wrapped around a pencil to clean up edges when required.

[2mtech]

Cut with curved scissors.

To clean up, drum sander on a Dremel am yer friend