Hello, I’m an architecture student in houston and am limited to one model shop that i buy scale structural materials from. I buy mostly trusses and building related scale materials for architectural models. Their prices seem really high and i have nothing to compare them to. If you know of some, please post some links and/or urls on where i can buy these items online or wherever. Thanks for your help.
Hello!
I am an architect student as well, but located in FInland. I am glad to see that someone other than me is interested in model building especially in this day and age when a lot of presentations are done with computer renderings only.
What kind of materials are you using? What scales are you building in?
I use mostly cardboard myself, thickness between 0.5 and 3mm. I also use balsa wood, assorted hardwoods, plywood and chipboard (for the base plate).
You can scratchbuild cars without major problems. I built a few cars for a 1:200 model once. I got the accurate scale by printing images in scale which were taken from the computer programme Archicad and its library. I could then carve the car from a piece of balsa wood (very soft and easy to work with). I then added wheels which were made from plastic rod and painted it a few times to hide the structure of the wood.
I made about ten of them and they took about 20 minutes each to make.
Here is a link to a site I found
http://www.howardmodels.com/supplies/