Over on the Lead Adventure Forum there are a number of people making very cool stuff out of cereal packets, cocktail sticks and assorted random odds and ends. This appeals to your correspondent, mainly because I am a tree-hugging bicycle riding hippy, and also because, being a tree-hugging bicycle riding hippy I’m generally short on money to fund any model making.
So when someone pointed me at a thread showing how to make a rather spiffy Fokker Trimotor from cornflake packets, handily in my scale of 1:55 or what tabletop gamers call ’28mm scale’, I got all enthusiastic about trying something like it.
Lacking the space for something as huge as an aeroplane, I decided to go for a 1930’s styled three-wheeled sports car. This could be useful in dashing tabletop adventures and would be exotic enough to appeal to my boys. At least that’s my excuse…
So far the ‘chassis’ is a cereal box card, with a piece of loo roll pretending to be a canvas radiator cover. The headlights gave me some trouble before I found that Middle Son had a bottle full of air gun pellets he thankfully wasn’t going to use, and was happy for me to take a handful. I drilled a hole in the pellets, superglued a pin in them, and sanded down the other side to make passable main lights. The sidelights are from round-headed dressmakers pins, treated the same way.
The wheels are made by sandwiching lots of bits of wire between several pieces of card, filing the result round and gluing a spliced piece of electrical wire insulation around it.
You can buy white metal castings for wheels. And having made two using my method I can see why…
Railway Misadventures 