Where do modelers get their blue prints?

I think it was Neil who was 3D printing a Vickers early tank, anyway I decided to copy him by starting a little project for a Japanese Ha Go.

Quite a lot of drawings of them on the internet but few give any dimensions, probably going to pull the overall overall dimensions and count pixels to fill in the gaps

I was curious how other people (hobbysts or the companies that make airfix,etc) design their models? The drawings I'm using must have been drawn by someone too and I don't feel like the japanese just gave away their tank designs

You find out where the companies old drawings and records are archived and see if they have what you want may be a museum or university, find a full size one and get your tape measure out, contact the maker if they still exist and see if they can help. Basically you put in a lot of hard work as most don't come up with a google search.

Patent office can also yield some info - sometimes !

The patent office (UK) are very helpful and not expensive but be aware that patent drawings can be very unreliable and often show details that are impossible to manufacture. Their sole purpose is to describe an idea or an improvement to an existing one.

Some drawings are very basic with little or no detail whilst others are very detailed but have features drawn incorrectly so as to not make life too easy!

Brian

As Jason says, a lot of hard work. I am coming to the end of 4 years developing 4mm scale mixed media kits of the LNWR 4" shunting engine and crane tank, they share a lot of common parts. There are very few drawings available. The overall sizes were derived from the weights drawing. The gaps were filled from photographs (knowing the major dims) and measuring the remaining shunting engine at the Ribble Railway on my way to a holiday in the lake district.

Dave

Airfix (now part of Hornby) use original drawings , if available, and work with museums and owners of preserved machines. They appear to be much more conscientious these days than in my youth!

They use photographs and even paintings for details of an individual subject.

Some of the bigger museums (e.g. Bovington) can supply accurate (hopefully) drawings of some of their exhibits

If you look at photos of the Vickers light tank in the museum its markings have changed greatly over the years despite being nominally the same! So try and use period images.

For the Ha Go I would suggest getting any overall dimensions you can get, and working carefully from photographs.

Different drawings can be very different and even different views from the same drawing are often incompatible.

If a plastic model exists you can cheat and measure it

For things built in feet and inches many sizes will be a convenient number of inches, for example many hand-holds will be 6" long! Things made in metric tend to use less obvious sizes/spacings.

My feeling is to accept some level of error in the detail but aim to get proportions right. Looking at how things are arranged relative to each other is often a good way to figure out (sometimes recursively) how they are sized and spaced. For example, IIRC many rivets on the light tank are 4" apart which greatly facilitates estimating the size of various plates. Beware irregular shaped parts that can look very different from different angles.

One places to go wrong is making handrails and grips too bulky, as these points of 'human contact' seem to impact on how 'realistic' we find a model. They are almost always between 1 1/4" and 2" in diameter, usually 1 1/2" or less. 1/8" makes realistic handrails in 1/12 scale.

For steam engines old engravings are often remarkably accurate.

Not sure if that helps much...

Neil

Where do modelers get their blueprints?

I have several old Plans Handbook published by MAP which listed numerous drawings for models. One is Issue 3 published in 1976 and priced 30p a lovely little catalogue for browsing. Are the drawings in it still available and if so from where? Neil??

Rik

Rik

The MAP plans were taken over recently by this company**LINK**

Dennis

Many thanks for that link Dennis. Hope it helps the OP as well.

Rik

I found some photos of technical drawings from a blog post. Original drawings being courtesy of the soviet researchers at NIITB who took it off a battlefield. Issue is the scans could be clearer and I don't think they were all in the article, don't know enough Russian to work out how to request images from whatever archive they were found in.

Bovington also has a Ha-Go and sells technical drawings for £10, doesn't mention what sort of detail and accuracy they go into though. Will probably enquire about it though.

Niel as a curiosity what scale did you design your tank to?