I am heading to the hardware store in the next day or two
to buy some ‘electrical’ wire for modelling rail profiles for Shape3d/AkuShaper.
Any one got some recommendations as to the best thing to get to model
the rail profiles.
you could use one of these. A little less disposable than wire.
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you could use one of these. A little less disposable than wire.
you know I bought a cheap one of those yesterday, probably identical to the $7.00 one on your web page reference.
I pushed it into a glassed rail and quite a few pins went askew and bent.
This thing is getting pretty close to getting hosed right out of the box!
What about the plastic one? an opinion?
I recently grabbed one of these from my boys’ room to copy a rail profile.
Low tech, but functional.
I have one with the wire feelers and one with the plastic feelers. Neither one was really suitable for what I needed so I made one from a bunch of wood strips, wingnuts and thru-bolts. I also like the flexible aluminum finger splints with foam padding. A friend who is a local surfer/shaper just takes a scrap of foam and sands his rail contour into it. He just shakes his head at my contraptions.
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Neither one was really suitable for what I needed so I made one from a bunch of wood strips, wingnuts and thru-bolts.
that wooden contour gauge is really nice.
looking through the archives :
I found soldering wire! Voila!
I also bought some #12 THHN wire(solid probably as oppossed to stranded) at the hardware store, which may be suitable
If you are going to model the new rail from a board you’ve got lying around, I’d go with the foam method John Mellor touches on. Just wrap some sandpaper around an exising rail and rub a scrap of foam against it until the shape of the rail cuts into the foam. You can use the “mold” pretty much forever. Great for getting and exact replica of the rail in different places on the board too. I’ve seen a lot of these little buggahs sitting in some pretty famous shaping rooms…Takes about 3 minutes to make. Way better than a wire.
John Mellors’ scrape foam method rocks. Easy, effective and cheap, funny how the simplest ideas are often the best.
do not go to the hardware shop, go to the pharmacy. They sell a thin metal plate used to form around broken fingers, that stuff works magic. It is around 3/8" wide and comes in different lengths to around 8". Holds the shape perfectly
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do not go to the hardware shop, go to the pharmacy. They sell a thin metal plate used to form around broken fingers, that stuff works magic. It is around 3/8" wide and comes in different lengths to around 8". Holds the shape perfectly
How reusable are these?
would 2-3 suffice for modeling the rails onetime on 2-3 different boards.
I can get volume over at Ebay on about 18 of em’?
they can be used many times and reform easily.
I gotta say the contour gage made from tongue depressors is sweet, but simplicity reigns when it comes to the finger splints and foam sandpaper methods. I have seen these foam blocks around a few off the “guru shapers” rooms here on Maui and Calif. The finger splits are ingenious.