Observatory Model

Last night I built the free observatory model from Dave Graffam using the tips from the just-released (and also free) Paper Modeling Guide (written by Jerry Jensen, released by Dave.) The guide is all about taking care with every step of the building process -- from cutting to pre-folding the glue tabs or spreading glue to the edges, there are lots of little details you might have not given thought before.

Even though it's a one-page model with well-designed parts, it took me about two and a half hours to build using all the ideas from the guide. However, as you can see the model does have some complex parts like the telescope and the roof, so it would be wrong to say that building any model carefully would take over two hours per page.

The point, however, is that the result looks simply great -- perfect, for my standards. I tend to build models in a chaotic fashion: cut and build some parts, apply glue stick without much care, sometimes find out I built something wrong... this little exercise in patience and method showed me how I can achieve better results.