Paper Models by James Merrigan

By James Merrigan

Sukhoi Su1- Enlarged to 1/32nd scale from a 1/72nd scale download and laminated onto a file folder. fuselage, wings, and tail built like a regular paper model, landing gear, prop, spinner, pilot, and exhaust are plastic. The cockpit is vacuum formed. All my paper/card models are decaled and painted.

Fokker Elll Eindecker - Enlarged from a Fiddlers Green model. You can see what is plastic, the cowl is made from an Excedrin bottle, the rigging is #26 ga. florist wire

Morane-Saulnier A-1 is completely scratch built. I used a free software CONE-3 to lay out the fuselage. That cowling is another Excedrin bottle.

If you're interested in trying a paper model I can offer the following based on my experience:
Keep it simple. A lot of my models are based on Fiddlers Green models, they are simple and cheap (a ML models F-15 has about 1500 parts) you don't want to start with something like that.

I use paper models to fill out my collection where there is no plastic model available. In my opinion paper cannot match plastic because it can only approximate compound curves (although a paper Bf 109 took 3rd place in 1/32nd and above at MosquitoCon 2 years ago).

I only use card for the basic fuselage, wings, and tail. Details like props, landing gear, cowlings, cockpits I do in plastic. I produce curves by rolling the card over a dowel, or pulling the card over the edge of a table to produce the camber in a wing for instance, I also use wooden dowels or skewers as spars. I do all my enlarging and reducing at Staples in black and white, it's cheap and I'm going to paint the model anyway. Then I laminate the folder onto file folder stock.

Here's a picture taken at a NJIPMS meeting. The model is based on A Fiddlers Green Siemens-Schuckert D-lll. The fuselage is formed from a cylinder and a cone with my favorite Excedrin bottle as a cowl and a cutoff plastic Easter egg as a spinner. The wing camouflage is a Battle Axe decal.

© James Merrigan 2003

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This article was published on Friday, September 27 2013; Last modified on Saturday, May 14 2016