Material for small-scale oars

[Dan DSilva]

Hello again,

 

Does anyone know where to get really thin round rods and sheets of wood or rigid plastic that would be suitable for making small-scale oars (like in the range of well under a millimeter)?  I know there are types of plastic commonly used for scratchbuilding models, but I seem to be having trouble finding the right place to buy it.

[Keith Black]

 You might try using wire for the handle and card for the blade

[TBlack]

If you go the styrene way, check out Evergreen Scale Models. Their site shows rod at .75 mm.

 

[Dan DSilva]

17 minutes ago, TBlack said:

If you go the styrene way, check out Evergreen Scale Models. Their site shows rod at .75 mm.

 

 

I think this is what I was looking for.  Thanks!

[TBlack]

Dan,

Every once in a while I have a good idea. But that's it for this year!

Tom

[grsjax]

You could have them 3D printed.  Draw up what you want and send it to maker like Shapeways.  Should not cost much and will be much less hassle than trying to make them that small.

Edited May 23 by grsjax

[Roger Pellett]

As wooden parts get smaller, you start fighting the grain.  When that happens, I like to use brass, readily available in rod and sheet.  In both cases smaller diameter and thinner than any wood.  In your case, brass rod looms with sheet brass blades soldered on.  Paint the finished oar.

 

Roger

[Dan DSilva]

On 5/23/2023 at 12:17 AM, grsjax said:

You could have them 3D printed.  Draw up what you want and send it to maker like Shapeways.  Should not cost much and will be much less hassle than trying to make them that small.

 

Not a bad idea, however the sheer number of oars needed for all the ship's boats I have planned is likely to make the cost inordinate even if each oar is fairly cheap.  I will keep it in mind though.

[Dan DSilva]

16 hours ago, Roger Pellett said:

As wooden parts get smaller, you start fighting the grain.  When that happens, I like to use brass, readily available in rod and sheet.  In both cases smaller diameter and thinner than any wood.  In your case, brass rod looms with sheet brass blades soldered on.  Paint the finished oar.

 

Roger

 

How do you prevent the brass from annealing when you solder it?

[Gregory]

Do you have a drawing with dimensions?  I have an idea I want to explore?

[Roger Pellett]

Most common soft solders melt somewhere between 600-700F.  This isbelow the temperature required to anneal brass.

Edited May 24 by Roger Pellett

[Dan DSilva]

Hadn't thought of that.  I'm used to using high-temperature solder with a blowtorch.

 

Gregory, I don't have any drafts for the oars.  They're going to need to be a variety of different lengths, but I've settled on the shafts being about half a millimeter thick and the blades a quarter to an eighth of a millimeter thick and no more than 2mm wide.  Of course, real oars were much more complex in shape than what I can turn out at such a tiny scale -- I'm satisfied as long as I can make the blades taper nicely to the junction with the bodies and have some hint of a medial ridge.

[Gregory]

Have you considered card?  It glues and paints much like wood.

I was asking for dimensions so I could experiment with my laser.

A certain amount of lamination might be part of the process.

It wouldn't be a problem to mail you some results if you are interested..

Edited May 26 by Gregory

[wefalck]

I recently made a bunch of oars in 1:160 from three layers of laser-cut paper:

Unfortunately, I didn't take pictures of the process itself. However, they are laminated from three layers of 0.2 mm thick 'Canson' paper, trying to more or less reproduce the varying cross-sections and longitudinal profile. The layers were cemented together using varnish, which hardens the paper and makes it also amenable to (light) sanding. 

 

[wefalck]

As an add on, I have a cheapo small laser-cutter that works with bit-images, rather than vector-graphics. Below is the image that was used to cut the oars:

The oars are about 22 mm long.

 

[Gregory]

You should check out Lightburn..

 

If it is compatible with your controller, it has some very powerful features like a tracer that produces vector images.

It has a very robust  tabbing feature, so you don't have to worry about drawing tabs in your images.

Another powerful feature is resizing.  You can work with larger images then resize them to virtually any scale.

You can also duplicate.  For instance for your oars above, just put one set into LightBurn, then, after you tweak it to get it just the way you want, you can make duplicate

items and position them however you want in the work area.

You can also save your work, and bring it back later with all your changes and settings. 

 

If you are interested in a particular feature, let me know and I will try to answer, though I am still learning.

[wefalck]

Thanks for the hint. I have to check the compatibilities. While I do all the CAD-work on my recent Mac, the laser-cutter is run off an older MS Windows XP computer. The current driver for the laser-cutter is not available for MacOS. If I could run the laser-cutter directly off the Mac, that would make things simpler.

 

All the artwork is done on EazyDraw and then converted in JPGs and then adjusted to the correct size in Photoshop.

 

However, we digressing with this discussion from the original subject of the thread ... 

[No Idea]

On 5/26/2023 at 5:08 PM, wefalck said:

I recently made a bunch of oars in 1:160 from three layers of laser-cut paper:

Unfortunately, I didn't take pictures of the process itself. However, they are laminated from three layers of 0.2 mm thick 'Canson' paper, trying to more or less reproduce the varying cross-sections and longitudinal profile. The layers were cemented together using varnish, which hardens the paper and makes it also amenable to (light) sanding. 

 

Goodness me that boat is so tiny - fabulous work 

[Toolmaker]

On 5/23/2023 at 5:08 PM, Roger Pellett said:

When that happens, I like to use brass

I can endorse this method. I used it for various oars on a 1/72 scale WW2 era vessel. The pictures will show all but if further details are wanted, just ask.

 

Hope that is useful.

Cheers

Paul

Edited Saturday at 08:16 PM by Toolmaker

[Dan DSilva]

These all look like good ideas.  I've already ordered the styrene several days ago, so I'll give that a try first.  If it doesn't work out, I'll look into brass.