Making Telephone Poles

Where is your diorama located, the US, Europe, where?  Are they power poles or phone poles?  Metal, wood or concrete?  Many decisions as they come in many different varieties.  You can use O scale railroad materials as they are 1/48 which is real close.  You could use wooden dowels for wooden poles.  Not that much difference for a 20, 30, 40 and 50 foot pole in the US.  Check out the railroading suppliers for these.

ebay! :) thanks!

Insulators, those little hat-shaped objects that attach the wire to the pole (to keep the current from flowing to ground) also vary from place to place and time to time. Many insulators on European poles were (or are) made of white porcelain. On the other hand, a hundred years ago in this country, many insulators were made of colored glass.

Unless you're an insulator fanatic like I am, you probably don't want to be that hair-splitting; the vast majority of people looking at your telephone poles won't be insulator collectors.

I'd be interested to see some pictures of your poles once you make them.

Mine's 1/35, but it's a pretty simple design, dowel, balsa wood and a litte bit of wire for the coils.  Sorry I don't have a better picture.

IanIsBored2000 wrote:

Mine's 1/35, but it's a pretty simple design, dowel, balsa wood and a litte bit of wire for the coils.  Sorry I don't have a better picture.

 

Hey look!  A diorama of the bad side of Miami!

I use the bamboo skewers for kabobs as telephone/power poles... The grain is pretty much in scale and they're cheap. .99 cents for a 100 of them at my local grocery store... Chopsticks are good too..