Outoppies Scale Modelling Dream Dioramas Blog: how to

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Friday, September 28, 2012

Quick Roof

Roofing how to

http://paulsbods.blogspot.de/2012/04/roofing-how-to.html

A question was asked recently over at the Steve Dean forum...how to work out the size of a roof. Normally I would just go for try and error to get the sections the right size, leading to a lot of wasted roofing material but after ´thinking about it I came up with this;

Make the tower (house or whatever..I´ve tested it and it works for all rectangular buildings) measure from each opposing corner and make a cross shaped insert.


Mark a point at the wished height in the middle of the cross piece. Make a mark at the height of the wall and join the two up. Repeat for all 4 sides.

Lay on a piece of card (or whatever) and mark from the top of the roof to each outside corner. Extend these lines to give a bit of roff overhang. If your building is exactly square, the first piece can be used as a template to make the other 3 sections..if not just repeat for the remaining sections.

Add tabs, either to the inside on the cross piece or on the roof sections and glue on. If the wall sections/cross piece are thick enough to lay the roof sections on and just glue, then the tabs can be ignored. The whole thing only took ten minutes with taking pics but would obviously take longer for a better looking finish.

How to sag (weight-down) Tracks

http://fcmodeltips.blogspot.com.es/2012/09/caida-en-las-cadenas-de-goma.html
How to imitate the weight at the vynil tracks

There are many models that include rubber or vynil tracks that are very easy to put in place but they have an important problem, they don´t have the weighted look that you can see in the real tanks.
There is a very easy way to do this. the only thing we need is a hairdrier.The first thing we have to check is that the tracks are firmly fixed, then we insert something between the return rollers and the fender. In this case I have used cotton buds wrapped in paper. It is important to put them all at the same time so we heat the tracks just once if not we would have to repeat the proccess and the track would go back to the original position where there is no preassure.

Once we have all the cotton buds in place we can heat the tracks with the hairdrier, the heat should not be too intense or else the track can be damaged. I would use the hairdrier at a distance of 20cm or more and try to heat all the track at the same time, if that is not possible simply move the hairdrier along the tracks fastly. Do it for 1 minute minimum and let it cool.

Once the tracks have gone cold you can take the cotton buds out and see the result, if it´s not sattisfactory you can repeat the proccess.
One useful hint, the tracks will always tend to turn back to the original position a bit so press the tracks more then the position you want.