The Prop
The Prop
It’s the little details that add up to make a crisp and professional looking model. If you haven’t figured out by now, seams drive me nuts and I do everything I can to minimize them, even in the places where you might expect to see them. The simple fact is that at these small scales, seams aren’t usually visible on the real articles. Then again I grew up in the church of IPMS plastic modeling and old habits die hard.
I built the prop hub as is from the Renova parts. I liked the blades, but no matter how I fiddled and trimmed the actual hub, I couldn’t get it to look right. You can see this is photo 1. Right next to it, photo #2, is the scratch built prop. Here is how I did it.
3. I chucked an old paint brush in my table top lathe (Taig Tools) and cut the ferrule off. I then used a sanding tool to get a rough shape.
4. Using the cut-off tool, I trimmed the wood shaft to the correct diameter, checking with a micrometer and marked the length.
5. The tip is cut to length.
6. The prop hub is shaped and sanded to a 400 grit finish and the shaft fitting cut to the correct diameter.
I finished the prop assembly by painting the hub black with a magic marker, attaching the blades with super glue and coating the assembly with clear flat from a rattle can.
Some of you may conclude you cannot achieve the same results. Not true! I started this kind of thing over 30 years ago, hand-holding my Dremel tool (any rotary tool) and using an X-Acto blade in the other to cut various shapes. I graduated from that process when I found an article in a very old issue of Popular Mechanics which had plans for making a lathe for a rotary tool. I redesigned those original plans and made my own using drafting lessons I learned at tech school. For about 12 years, Ninfinger productions has been hosting those and other of my plans. I am so pleased to say that they are still there:
Ninfinger Productions: Scale Models
Make your own lathe and enter a new phase of modeling. Finally, before I ever made that lathe waaaay back in the early 90’s, I previously purchased my current Taig Tools lathe even “waaayer” back in the early 80’s without even having a notion of how to use it. I finally learned how to use it when I had to start teaching machine tool technology in high school in 1998. I took a course at my local tech school and got my machine tool certificate. Get some education! Integrate that education with your hobby for even greater creativity and enjoyment.