Print, Cut, Fold, Stick...

...and wipe off the gluey finger prints.

My first foray into the fantastically detailed Scalescenes self-print OO (and N) gauge model kits. The idea is great; artwork in PDF form to build a highly detailed model, but the added advantage of being able to butcher and hack to build whatever you want, as you're in control of the print production.

I've bought a couple of kits, as they fit so close to what I want (still don't know what I'm going to model yet, but I know some of the bits I want in there) before I've even made one of the free ones.

I'm torn. I love the kits, the idea, everything, but my one let down is the cutting and sheet gluing. This isn't fault of the kits, more likely the fault of the crappy blades and steel ruler I'm using. Like the worst kind of hobbyist, I kitted myself out with everything I could ever need - glues, felt tips, stacks of board, matte photo paper, cans of fixative spray and a new safety ruler. On the upside, it did come in pretty cheap, circa £20, excluding the board, so even if this doesn't pan out it's not all going to waste.

Anyhow, back to me whining. I need to find a better cutting method, instead of the "40-stroke, cutting more metal off the ruler than card" technique, whether that be better blades or some amazing secret I've not been told of. Which, nicely comes back to one of the really great things about the kits - they're incredibly forgiving. Having built one of the free downloadable designs (the industrial unit in my case), even in a pseudo-half-arsed way, it looks damn good.

But I suppose that's the point; don't go flying into building the grand design, start simple and get some experience, albeit find out how it's not done, before wasting time, materials and sanity.

The kits are well designed, they build upon a couple of principles; covering, wrapping and masking. Covering involves adhering sheets onto heavy boards and cutting them along the lines, obvious and simple. A lot of crapification occurs here; badly stuck down artwork, frayed edges, wonky cuts - you get the idea. This is a given, unless you've got a die or a big punch cutter, you're not going to get perfect edges, which is why no cut edge is ever exposed.

The next kind of building block, wrapping, also starts with the covering stage, but the artwork is simple grey-line with white fill and results in pieces of board ready to be glued together or stacked, to be wrapped with the actual final artwork. This results in two edges having a seamless finish.

The remaining cut edges get their treatment, along with glued joints between different pieces with simple masking pieces of artwork, not stuck to board, just the weight of the matte photo paper, but with the white edges coloured with a average coloured felt tip. These masking pieces hide a variety of sins, including bad gluing, misaligned joints, really awful cutting and frayed edges.

Based loosely on advise, I'm using Pritt-Stick (versus Uhu Stick), I think for the next models I'm going to try using the Uhu Stick, as Pritt-Stick doesn't seem to adhere brilliantly - even with what looks like an even coating applied. A real pisser I found after the first gluing session, was deformation of the board (whether it was already there I don't know) from the adherence of the artwork. I ended up stacking all of the glued boards, and weighting them down with heavy art books. It corrected most of the deformation, but not all. I'm thinking that a bit of hackery with offcuts, glued perpendicular will help to stiffen and keep the bad bits straight (and give the finished model a bit of extra strength).

I've not had a clear run to build a kit, so have had to steal a few minutes here and there to glue a piece, clamp a bit, trim a bit and so forth. At the moment the industrial unit (low relief hence stubby side walls), can stand on it's own, with outer and interior walls. Next step is to build the office and add the sliding door details. Once the main bits are done, it's a case of masking and finishing with the finishing touches, and if it looks half-decent; a bit of extra weathering.

Anyway, check the kits out, they're great. If you've got patience to work with card (and to go through the effort of printing), then I think you'll be rewarded by going down this path. With all of the extra bits of artwork you can also get (matching textures for brick, concrete, tarmac etc), it's easy to hack and modify these kits to fit whatever need you've got. At the very least, try out the free kits...

As and when I finish the first kit, and move onto building the next kits, I'll post more images.