Plans collector!!!!

~ 500

Careful storage is the key to preserving blue prints or drawings.  ALWAYS store blueprints and drawings in a cardboard tube at room temperature for best results.  In expensive cardboard tubes are available from office supply stores, or if you want to in quantity, check out U-Line on the web.

Digital copying is smart.  Better still, have a copy made on Mylar which is a plastic sheet that will last a LONG time.  If you ever need a copy, take it to your local FedEx shop and they can make you a blue print.

I've got...well, probably a couple of hundred from various sources, and hundreds more in books.  I think ship plans are wondrous things; I've never seen one that didn't teach me something interesting.

One suggestion for anybody just starting out:  if you've got a blueprint (a genuine blueprint, with blue lines on white paper), keep it rolled up in a drawer.  That reproduction process wasn't designed to last.  The blue ink fades pretty rapidly in any sort of light.

Another approach:  take the blueprint to an architectural graphics store and have the people there make a photocopy of it.  Places like that have huge xerox machines that can reproduce such documents accurately - and the cost is quite reasonable.

I have several that  I picked up with intent to build, but never got around to building them.  Also a couple from SiS, when I did book  reviews for them, and they included plans in their review as being a sort of "book".  I am glad I did pick up some of those.  Ship drawings used to be the easiest modeling genre to pick up drawings for, but some of those sources are no longer available :-(  

Ship modeling is, I believe, the genre most likely to scratch build.  Lets face it- folks were modeling ships long before there was a model kit industry!

I have more than my fair share, like as not.

Abetted by having drawn some significant quantity, too (a lifetime drafting gives a person some skills and equipment to this end).

I have well over 1000...

Al Ross