What is the best material to add rigging to a 1/700 ship? I've heard 2-lb mono-filiment. Any other suggestions? I don't think I can convince my wife to give up any of her blond hairs!

Jim

Gunny swears by the Lycra material you can get from WEM.

Hi ya Jim:

Long time no see. I use stretched sprue for my rigging, but it is a tedious process. You have to experiment alot to get a fine enough strand to work, but I like it.

What Kenny mentioned also works great too.

Bob Pink.

Iv rigged many biplanes,and have used my wifes hair with success,but I have just finished a sub and rigged it with the WEM lycra.....it was an easy rig job but Im very happy with the results

Hello James Bongiovanni, take yourself outside, a shed or pick a day when its not poring down with rain, you'll need an old carboard box, lighter, plastic spruses from what otherwise would have been thrown away - set light to the plastic so its burning black with all the bits floating in the air, good hard puff blow it out, stab it into the carboard box and slowly draw back, slowly draw back, slowly draw back and then repeat, with this method you'll find the rigging is spider size, but be warned, it can also become brittle.

Dear James,

I swear by "Caenis" thread. This is a very fine thread intended for tying fishing flies on very tiny hooks. It is a polyester monofilament that is 20 denier gauge. It is therefore approx 0.04mm diameter. This is finer than the average human hair and about scale thickness for much of the rigging on a 1/700 scale model. It is remarkably strong, black in colour, and comes on a reel so it is easy to handle. Not least important is the fact that it is dirt cheap. A reel of about 100m will cost you somewhere in the region of $4 in the States.

You can get it from Stockard's flyfishing supplies www.jsflyfishing.com and I reckon they'll probably be selling more of it to us than they do to anglers.

To glue it I use old fashioned stationer's gum. That is the amber coloured stuff that they used to give us at school for gluing paper. It came in a bottle with a squishy rubber cap that you could spread it with. In the States I believe it is called mucilage. Providing you have a way of holding the rigging taut while the glue is drying and before you cut off the loose ends, the gum is quite strong enough for our purposes and it sets in just a minute or so. You can dilute it with a drop of water so that it can be applied with a fine brush. It dries without any appreciable lumpiness. Most importantly, being water soluble you can just wash it off if you make a mistake.

That's the very basic method that I've developed over the past few years.

Kind regards,

David Griffith

I'd like to play "devil's advocate" here for just a moment. When I got back into modeling one of the first books I picked up was Shep Paine's How to Build Dioramas. In the section on painting figures he mentions "scale distance." The basic idea is that the closest you can focus on an object is about 5" and that on a 1/35 scale figure that equates to about 20 feet. (frankly I'm not sure on his math here as I figured it to be about 15 feet.) If we take this calculation to 1/700 scale 5" away equates to about 291 feet. (700 times 5 divided by 12) At 5 inches then you would probably be able to see rigging and railings, etc. Frankly though I don't think most model ships are viewed at 5 inches. From where I am writing this I can see my 1/700 IJN Chokai, which I admit I rigged with sewing thread. I'm about 5 feet away, or about 3500 scale feet away, yet I can clearly see the rigging. I very much doubt in real life I could see much of any detail on a ship from over 1/2 mile away. The closest I normally get to the ships on my shelf, or at model contests, is normally 2 feet, or 1400 feet away. I still doubt I'd see rigging or railings from that distance.

I guess I'm saying that, at least in 1/700 scale, too much is being made on details that probably would not even be visible at scale distance for typical viewing distances.

OK, let the broadsides begin.

but..rigging is fun.....isnt it?............guys?...

We banish you to the cone of silence!

Rodger, you do make a very good point. However, for the sake of sales, photo etch is the only way to go!