German DIY stores are among the most comprehensive, to the extent that here in Istanbul the local Bauhaus once incorporated a mariner's section which retailed outboard motors amongst the chandlery. What it also once had, too, was exhaustive stocks of modelling material in wood. This was understandable given the Germans love of forest and folklore, beside an attention to detail that saw its best expression in model trains, for instance, or the photographic equipment later hijacked by Japanese industry.
Accordingly I could once secure any form of ply and balsa along with innumerable sections and spars... but no more. There are probably three reasons why. The first is the collapse of business consequent upon the coronavirus pandemic, and the second likely the fact that the retail zone had perpetually to be tidied up by the staff so as to reorder each item in the correct pigeonhole.
The principal reason however has to be the fact that modelling in timber is a declining art when such the same can be done on a screen. Nonetheless until recently the way I rendered designs as graphics was to build them at scale, photograph them and send them to a patent illustrator to convert into line drawings (and rendered in colour if necessary).
I have chosen this option given the constrained business circumstances here at the beach house on the Sea of Marmara. There's a lot to be said for building scale models beside, however, for the 'look and feel' of a three-dimensional object can never be recreated wholly on screen. This is why auto-makers still produce full-sized mock-ups to look at, and why Leonardo da Vinci produced at scale first when it came to prototyping. If you're contracted to make siege engines for Florentines then it pays to have portable demos.
Accordingly I shall for old times' sake render the prototype set for the ongoing GoFly challenge at sixth scale, and using what are effectively left-overs from the modelling stock at said DIY store.
Prepare to be amazed, therefore.
