[Rubenandres77]

I was perusing some ongoing projects and printed kits I had, trying to get out of the boredom that sometimes hits modellers.

At this moment I'm thorn between the far-from-visually-awesome FlyModel Fortress, and the extremely challenging Zarkov F-15.

Both started some time ago, and still far from finished.
I believe the Fortress could be much better, and I'm sure I'm not doing it so great with the F-15 and its nightmarish instructions.





I wanted to try something different and kind of "in the middle". Or, at least, as unusual as to make it interesting and keep me doing some paper work.

Last year I built UHU's simple version of the Tokyo Tower. Toddlea's Free model contest #5 - UHU's Tokyo Tower (simple version)
So I said to myself: "why not building the detailed version of it?"

The detailed Tokyo Tower can be dowloaded from UHU's site: #049「東京タワー(大)」ペーパークラム•ãƒˆ: uhu02 ペーパークラフト

It's 24 pages in total (actually 23, while #24 is solid color printed on the back of some of the pages).

Here are some of the most interesting pages:


(Yes, that's a 30 cm / 12 in. ruler and the 10 cm scale display in the center).


The kit is beautifully detailed. With extreme details in every part.






The original is on A4 size paper at 1:500 scale.

I upscaled it to 1:400 in order to match the scale of my Revell RMS Titanic. And to do that I had to print in Double letter cardstock.

At 1:400 this should reach about 83 cm in height not counting the base.

A word of caution if you wish to ever build this kit: the pages are so incredibly detailed, that each page file is heavy. and I mean HEAVY.
Proper actions are needed to ensure visualization on screen.
And the printing of each and every PDF of this kit could be a real nightmare unless you have a state-of-the-art computer and printer.
As for me, I just extracted the pages as bitmaps, enlarged them, and created new files for printing at the desired scale.

UHU said he used 0.21mm Canon matte paper.
The cardstock I use is 0.18mm and sprayed a couple of clear matte coats for protection which thickened it to 0.19mm.
I hope the thickness difference and increased scale will not affect too much the project.
Probably not, as the difference considering upscaling is only 7 hundredths of a millimeter (that's less than a 10th of a millimeter).

I don't even want to know how many cuts need to be made, It must be several million cuts.


Well, now that I think about it, this may not be exactly "easier" than the Zarkov Eagle.

But at least will keep me entertained for some time.

I expect this to be a very long duration project. I have no idea when I will finish it.
A good thing would be to finish it by December, on occasion of the Tower's 60th anniversary. But I wouldn't bet on that.

So... Stay tuned, because this will either be an epic win, or an epic failure.
And in any case you'll be able to tell your grandchildren about it


Until next time!