Starship Modeler Discussion Forums

A nice thing to do with 'found' stuff is to 'de-identify' it: breaking the shape down into smaller, less recognizable chunks. For example: a disposable razor. I've seen people use the whole thing, minus the actual head, as ship's landing gear. Too recognizable. The suspension of disbelief stops righ...

See, Mr. Jones? Here they come with the rolling pins

Word of advice: stop calling it 'Alves'. The abbots and abbesses will hit'ya over the noggin with a rolling pin.

Get an UV LED shining down the rod from the base, have the part near the model painted with some glow in the dark paint.

USB: 5V ± .25V / 100mA (low power mode: keyboards, connection to printers, thumbdrives etc.) or 500mA (high power: USB-powered fans, lights, charging iPods etc.) Technically, if the Frame is powered by USB, it needs a high power supply (500mA). I wouldn't just snip the cable away: I would build a ba...

Oh. From metric original to scaled imperial. Big problem is that calculators will give you decimal inch values. You got a decimal inch ruler? If so: 10 m = 5.467636 in. 1 m = 0.5467636 in. 10 cm = 0.0546764 in. 1 cm = 0.0054676 in. For standard inch fractions, it takes a lot of math to work out the ...

Funny. Down here I can get all sorts of sizes of needles, from insuline to horse, through catheters, from a variety of places (pharmacies, farm supplies, medical supplies stores etc.). I am always surprised at how easy it is for me to get things. It's a big city and I live close to downtown, where t...

Meet your new best friend. Set the proportion once, every measurement from then on is automatically scaled.

1 m on the original = 13.8 mm on the model;

10 mm on the model = .72m on the original.




Original is 17.4 m in length, model will be 17.4 x 13.8 = 240.12 mm

Model part is 22.5 mm, original is 22.5 x 72 = 1620 mm or 1.62 m.

Use the disk itself as a solar sail model. Add a ping-pong ball...

Nah, I'm just jerking your chain. :D Not that you couldn't heat form cover slides (I've done it: they're thin and small enough not to break up into pieces when heated evenly and to go soft very quickly — a few seconds, 10 to 20 with a pencil torch), but for most uses, clear plastic is way better, as...

Newbie Doobie wrote:...and it can be heated to bend around complex curvatures unlike polystyrene, or glass!

Says who? A suitable former (porcelain, metal) and a pencil torch, my friend, and a glass cover slide can too be smash formed.

Rogviler wrote:

modelnutz wrote:Do you have a cat ?

Their wiskers work really well for small scale antenna.

Heh, I forgot about that one. They usually aren't happy when you rip them out though, so I'd suggest scissors

I'd suggest patience (to wait 'till they fall off on their own). It's best for the skin (yours).

Mr. Badwrench wrote:File card is the way to go. Like a brass brush, only it's wider and the bristles are only about 1/8 inch long. I've never heard of the chalk method, but I've used a bar of soap to do the same thing.

I've used soap to lubricate saws, even razor saws.

I myself clean my files as I go along. If you don't let the buildup get too great, an old stiff bristled toothbrush will do. Also, As I have sweaty hands, I keep a bottle of rubbing alcohol (Isopropanol) to clean the skin oils, which can make the file glide over rather than grab and cut cleanly. So ...

Best-and-impracticable idea: Aerogel. Too bad you have to pay an arm and a leg to get a sliver of it. But hey, if you've got the money, and you need just a small piece (say for a 1/72 engine)...

Obfuscation aside, let's see: Try to find the source of the reference you used for size, and their reasoning. Sometimes they'll make a compelling argument. About the orthos, who did them? Are they (the orthos) accurate? The 'other' sources you compared the design you're working with, are they Sci-fi...

To give you guys useful advice, we need to know how the model is, and how big it is. Does it have a lot of greeblies onto its surface? Is it angular or curvy? Does it have sub-parts, like the Enterprise (saucer, engineering, nacelles) or the Galactica (main hull, outrigger hangars)? Is it like a Sta...

Four years ago this day, on Sat Mar 12, 2005 2:54 pm, GoFlight posted: Who collects stuff for scratch building?

Sacrifice one of the bricks, sanding it down in one tiny area (making a dimple in the plastic, if possible). This way you can see if the yellowing is superficial or it goes deeper. If it goes deeper, it is likely that the plastic has discolored from UV exposure, as Rogviller said. Then there's not m...

After the superglue/pencil lead mix dried for over a day I checked the joint's conductivity- nope, nada, zip. I'll try soldering the wires onto the LED. Thanks for the suggestions, that's because pencil lead contains no lead at all, just graphite & binders. The graphite itself would conduct nic...

I don't know if you'd call it a tool, but when I'm using RTV silicone to make a mold I'll inevitably have some left over. I pour this into a lid from cottage cheese or something similar, to make a disc. Since nothing sticks to silicone, it makes a great surface for mixing epoxy or paint as they wil...

The capsule also have philips countersunk screws. This I can not add to the surface I must place them in the surface. How do I do it? You can always do it the same way you'll make the screw-and-washer parts, with a small difference: drill shallow holes on the model's surface (just a conical 'pit'),...

IIRC, aliphatic means an organic compound w/o benzene rings. Aromatic is a compound with benzene rings. So, by that light, PVA is aliphatic. From a health standpoint, aromatic compounds tend to be more aggressive, requiring protection. Urethane resin used to be diluted with aromatic solvents, but ur...

I had toyed with the idea of adding green laser pointers to my MIM resin kit as it is hollow as well. I wasn't going to use them as the "weapons" but was going to mount them in the three gravity projectors on the bottom . The ship was going to be pole mounted in a diorama. This would give...

... I need someone more versed in elctronics to explain how it accomplishes the rainbow of colors... Easy peasy: just like the red-yellow-green LEDs of yesteryear were just two LEDs, one red, one green, built inside the same gob of resin, (when both were on you had yellow light) those multicolored ...

Apart from the ever unpopular two-part epoxy? I dunno. I also rip apart floppies, but I discard the outer shell, keeping just the shutter (only when it's stainless steel), the lock tab, the spring, the floppy hub and the pressure pad (if metallic). Of those, I have used the tabs as greeblies, the sp...

If you want to have a beam come off on the other end, no, it won't. That's because FOs work on total internal reflection, what means that light bounces around the fiber. That, in turn, means that the light of a laser beam, although it keeps most of its intensity, will be 'spread out', as parts of th...

I would go for something similar to the wooden dowel above, but with a styrene sheet triangular prism — triangular because that's a basic structural shape: it won't flex or bend as much as pretty much anything else (when you see the arms of construction cranes, they're triangular prisms—made of tube...

Joseph Osborn wrote:[...]Aves Apoxie Sculpt 2-part epoxy putty. It's so good, it's like warm apple pie...

Just don't eat it or, you know...