Acetone used to transfer photocopy parts to balsa

I use dope thinners and do my own laser prints.

The best method is to lay te drawing face down on the wood, and get a pad - sponge , loo paper or cotton wool - and soak it in thinners, then squeeze out.

Wipe that firmly over the paper till it JUST goes translucent, Not enough and its too faint, too much and the ink runs.

Practice makes - if not perfect - good enough, to cut from.

Photocopy works better when the plans are copied on a reasonably dark setting. Puts more toner onto the paper, which can then transfer to paper.

Don't use acetone I think methanol is safer. For the environmentally concious I'm told vinegar works as well.

Hot iron, which is unlikely to reach the flash point of methanol or vinegar......does vinegar have a flashpoint? IIRC most photocopier fusers run around the 90C mark.

Have to admit I've never done this but the other half has for some sewing stuff. Vinegar is what she used, can't recall how the results were other than she did it.

On Fri, 9 Dec 2005 20:17:01 +1100, "The Raven" wrote in :

Photocopiers can introduce small distortions in the copy.

Some copiers used to routinely shrink the copy 1% or 2% in one direction.

If you're doing small parts, it probably won't matter. The bigger the part, the bigger the problem.

If you want to do big parts, you should test the copier by copying a ruler and seeing how well the copy compares to the original in both the X- and Y-axis. Then try to orient all the parts the same way on the copy so that the distortion is at least consistent.

Marty

A valid point but given you're rarely dealing with A3 sizes or larger (metric paper here folks, not that US weird stuff) you won't get much inaccuracy. Another point to consider is how accurate such a transfer process will be on the balsa, will the transfer be 100% and how accurate are our cutting skills.

I used to work in the printing industry so I could also suggest to measure the paper before and after copying. While this is unlikely to yield any measurable difference large printed sheets can stretch by up to 5mm. So, for the big plan boys consider how accurate your plan really is.........

On Sat, 10 Dec 2005 16:02:05 +1100, "The Raven" wrote in :

I became aware of the problem when I was trying to tape four or five pages together to make a pattern for an Ultra Sport 40 fuselage (if I remember correctly).

The deviation was enough to be visible to my eye and led me to find out about the auto-reduction on our copier. It didn't make any difference to the construction of the fuselage. I think I used a yardstick to straighten out the lines and--of course!--sanded and sanded and sanded until the fuselage looked OK. It's still flying--after I broke the wing that went with it, I sold it and a TT .46 to a friend who had a good wing and no fuse.

Yes. I'm sure I can't cut and sand to 99% accuracy. :o)

If I've got the terms in the right order, what we need is a certain amount of precision so that parts that are supposed to fit together do fit together, while accuracy doesn't matter so much (except in scale judging).

Marty

Ted shuffled out of his cave and grunted these great (and sometimes not so great) words of knowledge:

If you want ACCURATE parts, have a copy of the plans made at a reputable place (Kinkos or a blueprint shop ) and cut the parts from the plan and use either a glue stick or rubber cement or 3M #77 (spray a LIGHT coat ) to adhere the cut out parts to the wood. It takes alittle longer, but the parts are not distorted.

The method I usually employ for small items is to scan in the relevant part from the original plan.

Load the scanned image into my usual photo manipulation software and crop as necessary.

Finally print this image using printer on to thin card.

Cut round printed image to make template.

Generally speaking I have found this method to be pretty accurate.

Granted, this method takes longer but the main benefit is that the plan remains intact.

The templates can be retained for future use (repairs etc.)

Al

byrocat wrote: