Hi Horst

I came across your site recently, I have to say the models look great the thing which stopped me buying a few was a comment along the lines of them being for advanced card modellers only. Could you not perhaps include a very simple vessel, e.g. a Higgins Boat landing craft, which we could buy to practice our skills upon? Ideally it would include instructions suitable for first timers. Will you expand the range to include MTBs?

Kind regards,

Christian.

To Christian and others contemplating the purchase of these very fine models.

Firstly let me say, don’t be put off by the comment “A CFP-model should not be your first card model. Knowledge of the basic techniques of card modelling is required. Advanced card-modellers won’t have problems with the models, but because of the small scale there are some very small parts to be handled”. The instructions are excellent and Horst (the owner of ‘Coastal Forces in Paper’ is only an e-mail away.

Here is a hint which I am positive any first time purchaser will find VERY useful.

“Initially, DON’T use the original kit as supplied, photocopy the thicker page of parts onto 250gsm card (the same thickness as your business cards) and I would suggest photocopying the thinner page onto something like 160gsm card which is only marginally thicker than paper”. These two thicknesses of card will go through a photocopier or you computer printer with no problems at all. The other ‘tools’ you will need are – a cutting board, a good quality knife with snap-off blades, a metal straight edge (ruler), a good quality PVA glue and finally a supply of toothpicks for applying and spreading the glue. By doing this, more than once if need be you can practice as many times as you need before turning to the actual model itself and being pre-coloured no painting or touching up is needed. Once you have mastered the techniques needed I am certain you will not stop at just one kit. I for one will be buying most of the available kits and I know he has more interesting models “in the wind”.

I am ‘playing’ with some of these kits, rescaling them up to 144^th scale and in two cases (so far) to the larger again 72^nd scale. I have been experimenting with different thicknesses of card for the larger scales and I have to say, the detail in these kits is, in my humble opinion very good indeed. The formulas I use to rescale card kits is:

Original scale (250) divided by desired scale (in my case 144^th), and if you need to get the decimal point in the right place, multiply by 100. That is

250 divided by  144 then X 100 = 173.61%

I have found however that merely using the above percentage formula is not quite accurate and I choose to do the following. To get your rescaled model to a more accurate length I use the following formula:

Boat length in feet  X  304.8 (the number of millimetres per foot) then divide by the scale you are working in. For example, the Fairmile C class MGB is a 110 foot boat/ship. Some say a boat becomes a ship when she is over 100 feet long. Others have mentioned to me a boat becomes a ship when she carries her own lifeboat.

110 x 304.8 divided by 144 = 232.83mm (close enough to 233mm).

There you have it, my thoughts on ‘playing’ with card models. Thankyou Horst for producing models of little known subjects.