While bashing a Jenny from the 1/72 Airfix DH4 recently, I discovered toothpicks make a nice replacement for missing/broken/too flimsy plastic struts. Toothpics are easy to cut to length and take acrylic paint well. You need to use CA cement to attach them to the model. Also, you can use either flat or round toothpics depending on what effect you want. Heck, you could even get those fancy colored cocktail toothpics.
One of my favorite "cheats" is to turn the model upside down and drip CA down the struts to fill gaps between the struts and the upper wing.
Your neighborhood budget basher,
Brian
P.S. It's great to be back since my hard drive and motherboard fried 2 weeks ago. I missed you guys!