John Fox III Posted February 21, 2020 Report Share Posted February 21, 2020 Greetings, Been experimenting with making gratings for my 1:96 scale sandbagger model. Photos sort of explain everything. Started out with some fairly stiff, .010" thick brownish orange card stock. Used red mahogany wiping stain and a kleenex tissue to darken the card stock. The card was then cut into strips 3" long and just under 1/32" wide. I made a jig out of aluminum, gleaned from the spouts of cardboard salt containers, designed to hold the strips about 1/32" apart. Strips were then slid into the jig and extended about 1/4", then another strip was slid under them at 90 degrees from their orientation. I used a metal engineer scale placed over the strips to hold them tightly on top of the cross strip. A small wire was used to apply cyanoacrylic glue to each side of the cross strips to hold it all together. I then cut the jig strips carefully off on each side of the strip that was left. Another strip was then glued on top of the "nubs" by hand, then pairs of strips were glued together. Five of these double assemblies were then glued together to make a single grid piece. For my model it took six of these pieces to complete the grating. The grating pieces were then sanded carefully down as thin as I could sand them without breaking them apart. I used a small block with two 1/32" thick pieces of maple veneer glued near each end to hold the grating pieces against a piece of 320 grit sandpaper and moved them back and forth to get to the thickness I wanted. Final photos show the grating in place on two models. More explanation on the hulls of my sandbagger models in another posting later. The whole process was fiddly and time consuming, but worth it for me anyway. Anchor's A Weigh! John Fox III Onni, Jim Goodwin, JesseLee and 5 others 8 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Foxworthy Posted February 21, 2020 Report Share Posted February 21, 2020 John: You continue to amaze me with you inventive techniques! This is a stellar representation of grates. Thanks so much for sharing this process with us. I'm sure I'll apply it on one of my builds in the future. It's just so clean and neat!. Regards Bruce Bernard Kelly and James w rogers 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bernard Kelly Posted February 22, 2020 Report Share Posted February 22, 2020 Hi John Your usual standards of innovation, technique and manual dexterity. Very nice indeed. Bruce Foxworthy 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Fox III Posted February 22, 2020 Author Report Share Posted February 22, 2020 Greetings Bruce, Thanks! I spend many hours thinking and experimenting whenever I come up against something that is new to me, or something that I was not totally pleased with results on previous models. Since my modeling scales vary considerably I often have to experiment. Anchor's A Weigh! John Fox III Bruce Foxworthy, Bernard Kelly and tazam0827 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Fox III Posted February 22, 2020 Author Report Share Posted February 22, 2020 Thanks Bernard, I do try! <Grin> Outside of working on my musical endeavors, I have lots of time to experiment with new techniques and methods, always trying to improve on every aspect of my modeling efforts. Anchor's A Weigh! John Fox III Bruce Foxworthy and Bernard Kelly 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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