Fiddlers Green

First off, I'm not a paper purist, so this has balsa, plastic tubing, paper, and homemade putty, as well as silver paint.

I first printed two copies of the propeller on bond paper and chopped out the center sections. I glued these on 1/16" balsa, and after they dried, I cut them into triangles by cutting at the base of the boot part of the props. Then I cut them into hexagons by cutting off the points of the triangles.

While the glue was drying, I roughly cut out a prop (printed on card stock) and glued this to a scrap of card stock. When this was dry, I carefully cut out the prop, and gave it a coat of clear nail polish on both sides. It was now nice and stiff, so I gave it a good coat of black marker to both sides.

Now, I glued a balsa hexagon the each side of the prop.

I next cut two pieces of plastic tubing, one for the front and one for the back. [I don't make spinning propellers, due to many accidents in the past.] Tubing is easy to cut with square ends by rolling it back and forth under your Exacto knife. I suppose you could"roll your own" paper tubing, rather tha use plastic, but harden it by saturating it with thin super glue.

Carefully center the tubing pieces and glue to the prop (I used gap-filling super-glue). When dry make a small ball of modeling putty and cram it into the front tubing. Sand it to shape when it's completely dry, and paint the hub with silver paint, tip the blades with yellow, and super glue it in place on the model.

This is the final result:




Bob

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I'm not an old fool, but I'm taking a correspondence course to become one.

Very nice work!

Couple suggestions to make that prop look even more real:

1. Make the blades as two pieces glued back to back (not folded; glued. A folded leading edge is much too fat at any scale but full size: prop leading edges are sharp). At the shank, curl the blade halves fully semicircular so the blade root is cylindrical. Don't worry about the butt joints of the blade halves there - they'll hold. Use a bit of plastic tubing as a male mold if you have to. Also, give the blade a bit of twist out toward the tip in gluing the two halves together. The tip angle of attack is considerably flatter than the root angle of attack.

Done right, the finished blades look remarkably real.

2. With the hub, use a small round file to put a concave curve into the hex sides between the blades. This touch alone will add considerable realism, but you can go further: split your hub in half in the plane of the propeller. Sandwich a thin hex WITHOUT concave curve in any of its sides between the halves. This will simulate the bolt flange of real prop hubs and give the plastic model crowd realism competition that'll make 'em sweat.