I've broken through my building block (I hope) with enough time left to participate in the latest free model contest. My entry is Sergey Kamotsky's soviet rail gun train
http://www.papermodelers.com/forum/r...3134_201381877 . The link has a good cover for the kit, so I won't clutter up our server with another copy of it.
Upon downloading and unpacking the kit and loading the pages into photoshop, I encountered some really wierd page size and resolution numbers, so the first task was resizing all the images. I resized the images by entering 300 dpi for resolution and 11.69 inches for page height. After printing, the little size-check ruler Sergey included on each page exactly matched up with my ruler, so scale of the model as built is 1:87. Because of the complexity of the model and time constraints, I will be building it pretty much "out of the box." In addition to the railgun and train engine/tender, there are six additional rail cars and two vehicles, which will be enough challenge to get finished by contest end.
As my personal preference is the appearance of butt joins vs lap joins, I am cutting off all tabs. Where possible, I am laminating the parts for major components onto 2 mm thick matt board, and using the additional thickness for gluing surface; otherwise, I am adding my own joining strips. Also, I am constructing the wheels using the technique that Cut-n-Paste posted in the vehicles downloads section. Given that there are 32 wheels for the railgun alone, anything that makes the task easier is appreciated.
So far, I have gotten the first of the two gun support platforms assembled. No pictures yet...I'm still struggling trying to tame my new Nikon camera. My trusty old Canons (all three of them) have quit on me. All three cameras have the same problem....the display is just a blank screen when in view-finder mode, and even the optical view finder is blank. The display screens work fine in menu mode, and show the stored images just fine in photo album mode...but all three cameras are glorified paperweights when it comes to taking any new photos. Anyone else had this problem with Canon cameras? Even though I have a replacement, I still am not wanting to abandon them.