jay thanks for your input, i thought you may have been lurking like a ninja in the background You are correct, i would have thought those specs to be absolute. No doubt i would have fiddled with them at a latter date. Matt's advice (both of them ) has been life saving as i know very little about shaders and textures and your input has added another demension in that i now realise plastics have differant properties and one must know what they are to reflect this (pun intended) in their work.

Matts help (both of them ) has been great. Invailuable actually. Jay you say do resarch on reflective qualities can you recommend the best way to do this and/or how that translates into the blinn attributes. (i know its a big ask and a big question, so no worries if its too much, i mean it might take pages to answer that)

is there somewhere out there a web site or tut that i can look at that will explain how to translate the differant properties of things like plastics or metal and what parameters they translate to in the attributes editor? So one can know intutitively rather than by simply looking up figures and input values, both ways are important but you guys get my drift.

thanks again guys, may the force and all that be wih you...

oh yea, i did a quick mental ray render, with some slight tweaking with the refractions and FG. just wher it should look, 5 by 5..