Laminated prop in paper

[redhorse]

Very very impressive!! Thanks very much for the tutorial.

[zachy]

Lief, I have built four of you props and love them. I should have read your build first. I will do better next time. i bow to the master.

[treadhead1952]

Amazing process, simple and elegant to arrive at a marvelously well built and authentic looking prop. Like the others, it fairly begs to build something appropriate to apply it to. Thanks for taking the time to break it down and write it up for us all to enjoy.

Jay Massey
treadhead1952
Las Vegas, NV

[birder]

That is very pretty work! Looks like it is wood.

[member_3]

Thank you for sharing the technique and the kit. I have several 1:33 WWI fighters that will benefit from the lessons presented here.

[Nowhere]

Thank you for this tutorial. It's very helpfull forme

[Gil]

Hi Leif,

The title isn't meant in the normal sense, but more so in the literal sense. Let me explain.

There are Aerophiles, Nauticalphiles, Cyclophiles, Autophiles and a host of other categories that lead me to think that modelers are naturally attracted to modeling by their Aphiliation (I'm inventing words that don't exist as I go, the last seems to be accepted by spellcheck, hmmm) and their innate ability to afford the time and expense of modeling their heart's desire but will never own the real thing (now there's a frightening thought). Note that I'm climbing out on a limb here so I beg of you to give me a little support as I may be sitting on the wrong side of the saw so to speak.

The aforementioned leads me to speculate that this may be a major reason why so much time is devoted to creating reaility in miniature. The other is the innate engineer in every modeler to create and to build (is this a manifistation of a very primitive instinct I wonder?).

The last part is the unfettered access to publishing on the World Wide Web. The reason that card or paper modeling is actually gaining headcount is through the internet and the fact that the growth can be attributed in no small part to people like you publishing "how to" tutorials for the average modeler. Placing the "I can do that" in the minds of the modeling reader is a very important psychological confidence builder that reinforces the readers interest and hence the hobby.

So, in closing, I think your tutorializing contributions are establishing the paper medium as a genuine and substantial modeling genre. The fact that they are well done producing superior modeling results establishes a tradition that modelers, in turn, may use to exhibit their own developed techniques. So in a word "Boffo!"...,

+Gil

[Leif Ohlsson]

First of all, thank you very much for sharing your ejoyment of something new and good. I agree that it is a source of joy every time you experience the "I can do that too"-feeling (Gil's very apt characterization). And it is a good feeling indeed to have been the source of it in this instance.

Ideas never just pop up out of nothing. This one took longer than it should have to gestate. I remember seeing a thread or a note on the site about a commercial company making rather complicated automatic laminated models of almost anything in a special machine using hundreds and hundreds of layers of ordinary white office paper.

Still, I kept fumbling along the road of different complicated tabs to help alignment. Zachy is a little bit of a hero to me, since he has already built four of the 1/33 props with that method (which was published a bit prematurely in the Sopwith Camel thread).

While all of the time the solution was there, waiting to be picked upon. The coin really ought to have dropped a bit quicker, but there you are. Zachy, I hope you don't feel too frustrated. This is your belated compensation:



In front of the 1/16 prop you can see the 1/33 and 1/72 versions. They are 18 and 9 layers respectively, and brand new kits of them have already been uploaded to the downloads section on the site.

With practice, and fewer parts in smaller scales, building time goes down. The 1/16 prop took a day to glue up, and one or two more days to sand & varnish a number of times.

The 1/33 prop was cut out and glued in an evening, with some sanding & varnishing spersed out over the next day.

The 1/72 prop was cut & glued within an hour, with another quarter of an hour later on for a quick sanding and a layer of varnish.

Leif

[Leif Ohlsson]

Changing the scale is not just a matter of eliminating every second layer and scaling down the diameter (which I did in this case, before realizing the mistake in the nick of time). You have to redraw the prop parts, so that each part covers the area two parts used to do.

It is not difficult, as long as you remember the principle.

The result is a two-page kit, page one to be printed on the lighter shade of wood-coloured paper, and page two on the darker shade. This is what the finished 1/33 prop looks like:



It certainly can be made better with a little bit more care. This time I was mostly curious whether the method itself would work in half the scale - and it certainly did:



Everything of course is much smaller:



You have to watch out really carefully when cutting out and glueing the square jig sections. It is very easy for the stack to take on certain aspects of the Leaning Tower of Pisa which inevitably will result in misalignment. And in smaller scales, any little deviation results in much greater relative misalignment. Watch out for that, and be precise when you cut out & glue those square jig parts!



Above a photo illustrating the "edgecolouring" technique of applying a thin string of glue to the edges, in order to get the tear-off note pad effect. This is common to all scales, but I haven't illustrated it before.

Here's what my 1/33 test build looked like, fresh from the mold, before sanding & varnishing:



Leif

[Leif Ohlsson]

Contourcreative & Art Deco - this one's for you, with gratitude for all your beautiful 1/72 models.

The 1/72 prop kit consists of three pages. The first one is just for reference. If you print it, do it on ordinary white office paper. Then you can cut out the hub parts from that sheet (optional indeed at this scale - I abstained).

The second page contains the light-shade wood-coloured parts at the top of the page, and the third the dark-shade wood-coloured parts. This is done so that you can cut the paper and use the rest for printing more parts or doing other things with it. Print these on ordinary 160 g paper, or possibly slightly thinner if you happen to have it anyway.

Here's what the finished prop looks like:



Parts in this scale are really tiny:



But the method works even in this tiny scale.:



In the 1/72 version, I skipped the part about trying to pin the small parts down. The jig takes care of alignment very well without them:



I'd skip the pin for the 1/33 version next time as well - it's harder to hit the absolut center of the mark with a pin than it is to place the part centered within the jig!



Above is what the 1/72 prop looks like fresh from the mold. No trimming whatsoever. And I think it's so endearing, even without sanding & varnishing.

With the 1/72 version I also tested a simpler variant when making the first layer. As scale goes down, so the relative width of parts increase (one prop part in this scale covers the relative space four parts covered in 1/16 scale). Therefore, the prop part in the first, bottom, layer was cut out as well. The jig section of the layer was then brushed with petroleum jelly, and the prop part put back in.

Then the jig section of the No. 2 layer was glued on as usual, and glue applied through it on to the first prop part below for addition of prop part No. 2. Works very well, and you could try out this method on other scales as well, I believe. It is simpler.

These tips are a bonus to readers of this thread - they never made it into the kits.

Leif

PS. The next logical step downwards in scale I leave to you, Ray (Texman). I guess that for a 1/144 scale prop you would have to work with ordinary 80 g paper for scale thickness...