HI, anyone have a technique to fold the PE ship ladders.
I’ve come across two kinds. The first, bend the sides up.
The second, which IMO are ridiculous, also would have you bend each tread to be horizontal.
To bend the sides up. Make the first bend either with a bending tool or a pair of razor blades. Then flip it around and make the second by holding it with a thin steel ruler and bending with a razor blade.
As for bending the steps…the thing is etched so that the steps can be bent “up” with the ladder face down. One by one using the tip of a #11, then some pretty meticulous work to get the sides bent using a pair of razor blades.
i doubt the above was any help at all.
I use tweezers to bend the steps after bending the sides based on the type of ladder.
I do it pretty much as Greg does. Lately I have been using a piece of mdf board with an edge cut with a fine saw and sanded smooth as an anvil. For the first side rail I hold the bend line right at the edge and bend it down with my 6 inch steel rule. For the second I follow what Greg does.
Oh , That’s a good Question .
What I do is this . Lay the ladder down in front of you facing in the direction with the top to your left , bottom to your right . Now take a Box-knife Blade ( Two in fact ) And put one at the very edge of the siderail-tread area . Slip the other under , lifting as you do .
That should bring the siderail and handrail to vertical from the treads . Now cover the other side Flat with the blade and make sure you are again on that close location of the treads and siderail . Slide the blade under again , lifting the tread side as you do .
Now at this point you should have a perfectly shaped square edged " U " , handrails and stair-side rail vertical on both sides .Take a postal tweezers .The one with the 1/8 " wide blades on the end .Hold the top of the stair at forty - five degrees and gently flip each tread into place with those tweezers .There you have one set of stairs .
If it’s a sharper angle you can gently adjust it after installing making sure all treads are now horizontal as well . Good Luck .T.B. P.S. Just make sure that when you use tweezers to flip the stair treads they do NOT have any teeth or grooves in them .The jaws MUST be smooth !
The last time I tried bending the individual steps on a 1:350 model, half of the steps broke away from the rest. I don’t intend to bend any more steps on that scale, only larger scale.
Don;
I found on 1/350 you have to be much gentler . I probably take at least twice the time than what I do in 1/96 or 1/87 . I have also found that Brand matters a lot . Many times my Toms’s P.E. was about thickness differences between frets .
G.M.M. and Eduard seem more consistant on the thicknesses and the material . Even Trumpeter beats Tom’s sometimes . Shoot , I use whatever brand is easier to get and just slow down and take my time . I can and do have the same problem in the larger scales .
I found that using a bending tool or the BACK edges of the Box-Knife blades works better. Using the cutting edge gives you a sharper bend , but that can break the tabs that hold the treads on the sides . It leaves a microscopic score line that you can’t see .That’s why they break .
After a whole afternoon doing ladders for my 1/200 Arizona and the Bismark I figured it out and learned . T.B. P.S. When I did the P.E. for Nauticus’s U.S.S. Wisconsin for BaD ship models I had it down pat .
Yet another advantage of building in 1/700, I’ve never bothered with trying to bend the steps on any of the ladders … heck, I don’t even think you CAN bend them. The downside being, of course, that the older I get, the less that ANY kind of PE work appeals to me.
Hi;
Guess what ? The old brain figured something out . In 1/700 I don’t use P.E. Ladders . I use Zip Ties of various sizes . If you look at some carefully they look just like steps . T.B.
I think the problem I had was, for this particular Trumpeter kit, the PE was hardened very hard, and was thicker than most PE stuff. In retrospect, I should have annealed it first, but there were only two ladders, I had destroyed both before recognizing the problem. Fortunately I had a couple of PE ladders from my ship spares box that worked pretty well.
Yeah :
I have gotten in the habit of cutting one ladder off the fret . If it forms right I go for it . If it is stiff then I anneal it . T.B.