Scaling it up.

Previously on the blog I've discussed paper models as a cheap source of ships for modeling a port.

A long time ago I purchased an online model of the SS Californian (for $10 US), a ship who's main claim to fame was not coming to the aid of the Titanic until it was far too late. Despite this, it is a good example of a turn of the century general cargo steamer. The model scale is 1:400. A bit of calculating gave me an approximate increase from A4 to A1 (283% giving a  scale of 1:140 or thereabouts). Since I don't have ready access to an A1 capable printer I trekked off to the local warehouse stationary. I wasn't sure how much it would cost I opted to print out the 2 sheets with the basic structure (there are 5 total). A couple of hours later (and 1/2 a greenhouse rebuilt) I had them back, for the princely sum of $4.50 a page (about 1/2 of what I was expecting). I was happy to see that the PDF had scaled very well with no pixelation that you would expect to see in a photocopy.

And how big is it? The Californian was ~5000 tons (so not that big) and 136 m long. That is not going to mean much to the blogs readership, so I thought I would show you visually. Here is a
re post of the picture of the ship that's been sitting on the workbench for a long while sitting next to the wharf with some wagons for scale. Its 50 cm long.
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Here's the same ship sitting on the printouts.....
It looks as though its going to be about 1m long.

Now some of you will be asking "Isn't this just a bit too big?"

I'll re post this picture of Timaru. Note the large steamer at the back. The wharf at the front is approximately 200m long (judging from google maps) and the steamer at the back is roughly 2/3 of that length (and looks remarkably similar in basic design).

I'm planning to use it as a backscene for the wharf module.