Greetings friends.
I would like to start this little item by admitting to being at times not the brightest budgie on the perch. However I do enjoy my model making and the freelance concept based on a working prototype does offer many opportunites as well as the usual disclaimer that faults are in fact design features.
The problem I come up against all the time is how big to make things. I am well aware of scale and how to convert scale sizes to inches or millimetres etc. But if, for example you need a winch and you are modelling at 24th scale how big do you make the winch. Can it be that you can make it too small or too big? If you need a deck crane how do you know what size to make it. I know that if you have a scale drawing, overall dimensions are easy enough to obtain. Now unless I am dead on my perch with my feet glued to it, it seems to me that we need some drawings of specific items, Bollards, Winches and all the other bits and pieces that make ships what they are, dimensioned at full size so we can calculate the respective scale sizes.
Now, I am quite prepared for Martin to award me 'Wally of the Month 2009' for the question but it is born from the frustration of building a Springer to the scale of 10mmm =1 foot and trying to work out how big the winches should be and how big the warp storage drums should be etc. Does what I am trying to say make sense? I await with trpidation some replies. Peter