Nice to see the marvellous ships here! Here’s some of mine. Fully scratchbuilt from a mix of paper, plastic, foam and wire, scale 1/500.
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Pretty impressive! Ever see Phil Toy’s scratchbuilt ships? Just incredible: ModelWarships.com - Gallery
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And here’s some additional ships, vehicles and planes, all scratchbuilt from paper, foam, wires and plastic sheets, and all at 1/500 scale.
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I admire those modelers that can do that kind of thing. It takes a lot of planning and patience. I’m slow as molasses when it come to scratch building anything.
I haven’t done any scratch building since the early 80’s. I stopped doing conversions by scratch work, aside from minor work, maybe a decade or so later. Both things I stopped because between new releases then or 3D printing now that moth things that I wanted to do would come out in some kit form after I had completed the project. Nowadays any scratch work that I do is going to be improving details here or there on a build.
LZP, what are the ships in your 1st picture of 5 ships & what scale?
Today’s kits and detail accessories do make it a lot easier to build a really nice model, but for people like me that like the really weird stuff, scratchbilding still has a place.
But yeah, the days of cutting bits of sheet plastic from McDonalds coffee cup lids and vac-forming canopies from discarded blister packaging seem like a long time ago. A friend recently acquired one of those old Mattel vac-formers from someone’s dusty stash. I was never lucky enough to get one, but I have a perforated bread pan glued to a piece of wood that does the same thing, but without the built-in heater.
And the weird kit selection these days is nothing short of astonishing. I think the Ukrainians are using some kind of dream-sucking device to make kits of subjects lurking in my sub conscience.
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That is a near genius work-around for a vacu-forming machine. That’s going to be an interesting shopping list, but I’m doing it anyway. Is that a treaded plastic pipe used for the vacuum attachment?
4 Arleigh Burkes DDG and 1 Constellation FFG, scale of 1/500. Right after I finished the Constellation ships the Pentagon cancelled it 
Yes it is a PVC pipe fitting sized to fit my old vacuum cleaner. You could also use a cut down crevice attachment from the vac to ensure a perfect fit to the hose.
Save yourself time and trouble and use a PC prototyping board instead of drilling hundreds of holes in a pan. Make a simple wood box with some supports under the perforated board, making sure that air can freely flow around them.
I am not 100% sure how well the fiberglass board will handle the heat. Maybe someone has tried this and knows the answer.
I hope I am welcome here with my collection. Building tanks from paper was something I began as a kid, naturally they were primitive. Later at some point I was interested in printed paper models but nowadays I am crafting everything from ground up. Every vehicle here is 1/150 or approximately that.
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Welcome to the forum, and holy cow! Those tiny paper tanks are stunning!!! Amazing work. If you can, please post a WIP to show us how you make these little jewels!
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Everything you see here was scratch-built, except for the fire bottle and two lights robbed from an old Verlinden set, using pics I could find and the old Mk. One eyeball. This depicts a flightline parking spot at NAS Fallon.
Steve
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