Blinds not just to look out of anymore..

Hello All,

This is a long post.

I came across this over the past weekend and thought I would share it with all. I am in the process after moving into a new residency of replacing the horizontal blinds (which are relatively inexpensive) in some of the rooms in the house, these are both the plastic and metal type.

Well the idea that came to me was to cut the pull strings from the old blinds and then remove all the slats.

Well now on my model bench I have a nice stack (200 pieces) of .017 inch thick x 1.00 inch wide x 32/42 inch long (.4 mm thick x 25 mm wide x 812/1066 long) plastic stock to use in scratch building projects. The material is a little soft but I have no problem gluing it together with CA and using filler putty on it, it sands well and can be scribed as well using light pressure.

Now onto the other cool item.

I did the same thing with the metal one as well this being .007 inch thick (.18 mm thick) material which is I think Aluminum. Now I found that they can be cut to any shape with a sharp pair of hobby shears,and a set of hole punches. It can also be sanded and painted after roughing up the surface with some fine grit sand paper.

Now what I found is by triming the strips into thin sections they could be used as scribing templates, by taping them down onto the surface of the model they follow the contours and shapes really well.

I also found that they can be bent into shapes and glued to a model as scratch built parts.

So next time you go to replace those blinds think twice before throwing them out.

Cheers,

Thom