A friend found this paper kit at a yard sale. I never tried paper, so… I am learning a lot about this, and if one wanted to make these into decent models it could be done. But it is not easy and it is a lot of work! No instructions came with the kit. The original was 1/250 scale, and would be about 4 ft long, so I went to Kinko’s and reduced the 16 pages to what comes out to about 1/410 scale. That was the biggest scale that would still fit each page on a letter sized sheet of card stock.
It’s evident that you need to tack it down on a flat board to avoid warpage.
You can’t see all the bumps and warps in the pic. I could do better if i did another one. If one really wanted to do this right it would be necessary to bring in some scratch built parts and maybe PE. Flat paper just does not like compound curves.
Fred . That is a truly novel model .Now did you figure the moves in cutting the paper and glueing that will let you deal with those compound curves ? They all have steps that let you do this .I’ve been doing these since my first wife went to the angels and I still do as a break from anything that even resembles wood , plastic or metal .
At shows and contests, I find the most popular genre for paper models seems to be ships. Many folks find it hard to believe such nice models come from paper kits.
The biggest compound curves, in this case the stern and the tops of the stacks, are done by cutting angles out and then setting the edges back together. The stacks came out OK, if you don’t look too closely. The stern is a disaster. I suppose a purist would want the whole kit to be paper, but if I was serious about this I’d scratch build those parts out of wood. I’ll post a finished pic when I’m done.
Use different thicknesses of paper. You can laminate sheets together before cutting the pattern out to get thicker parts, and copy onto thinner paper where you need to.
Get the model tacked to a flat board from the start to avoid warping.
Everything must line up perfectly. errors multiply.
Everything is printed in color where needed. I did a little touch up paint here and there. For instance, the hull is in three sections, so I filled in the seams with black acrylic.
As I said , that is a nice looking model . I wanted to share something my Landlady suggested and by golly it works ! You know what a steam iron does to a shirt , right ? Well she took a hot spoon ( dipped in boiling water ) and applied a slightly damp piece of paper to the back of the spoon .Guess what ? One beautiful spoon shaped piece of paper after it cooled !
