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Making stencils and masks - any resources for shapes?

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  • Member since
    November 2009
  • From: Twin Cities of Minnesota
Posted by Don Stauffer on Wednesday, September 21, 2011 9:27 AM

It depends on what you want to use it for.  I often print masks or stencils on adhesive "address" label stock.  However, that cannot be used for masking paint- the labels are not water (nor paint) proof.  They are fine for marking, for scoring panel lines and stuff like that.  There are some labels that are transparent, and hence plastic.  Those might be water/paint proof- I just have not tried them yet.

Google searches can turn up lots of scale drawings for making patterns on computers.  Any decent photo editing program allows easy resizing.

Canopy masks would be a challenge because they wrap around a curved surface.  The ones I have used so far go on flat or only-slightly-curved surfaces where the perspective does not distort them too bad.

Don Stauffer in Minnesota

  • Member since
    September 2010
  • From: DFW, Texas
Making stencils and masks - any resources for shapes?
Posted by NervousEnergy on Tuesday, September 20, 2011 1:01 PM

My wife is an avid scrapbooker, with a craft room that makes my modeling / PC cave look positively barren.  She recently upgraded her Criket to a larger device that handles wider paper, and I claimed the older machine.  This is basically a 2D CnC machine that cuts out just about any shape from paper on up to thin cardboard.  It typically runs on cartridges that contain a fixed set of vector based artwork, but it can also be attached to a PC and driven with a third party program that can feed it any vector graphic shape that you care to devise.  

Which, of course, brings me to the reason I appropriated the older model.  Masks and stencils. 

Does anyone know of any good resources out there that have accurate shapes available for insignia, aircraft number fonts, or canopy framing?  I don't want to steal anything from Montex or Warpigs masks, but spending $10-$15 on a stencil set of one insignia in one scale size when the production cost is literally a few cents isn't terribly appealing.  Even bitmaps will work as those can easily be converted to vector graphics if they're high quality.

I'll try and make a few of my own, but if there's a site that anyone knows of that has freeware images of various aircraft related shapes it would help a lot in the short run.

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