Odd bits and pieces. Any suggestions?


S

StrasburgNut

Pennsy Area rail fan
As I work in an office environment, I am always able to come up with all sorts of little bits that I see having potential. Two right off the bat are the empty calculator tape rolls and scotch tape rolls. I have a ton of those. But when you or someone in the office get a new adding machine or printer, there are always some neat little doo-dads. Has anyone every built anything of these little bits? I see the adding machine tape rolls being something a steel industry could produce, or as a pile of water mains that a street crew may be installing. Anyone else have these typre of inspirations?
 
Adding machine cardboard centers make good concrete pipe once painted. Tape dispenser rolls make great looking steel rolls for gondolas suitably banded and painted. Push pins make excellent bollards if you're modeling a harbor scene. Staples have a myriad of uses, from fence posts to highway guard rail supports. Business cards are often sources of nice, full-color logos for signs. If you happen to work in an engineering firm, drafter's tape is always useful if you can liberate a few rolls. :) If you work in graphic arts, artists' crepe tape makes a great filler for gaps in grade crossings and such.

Yep, there's a lot of stuff in offices that are useful on layouts, depending on how resourceful you are and how much you can get out the door with without getting caught. :)
 
I just bought some carpet for my new extension room and it was rolled on a 6" cardboard tube. I thought about trying to cut off pieces in my miter saw and finish them into storage tanks. Maybe use the printout tank thingys around them that Steve had talked about.
 
Here is where I used a household funnel as the top of a precipitator (part of the pollution-control apparatus of a blast furnace).

kitchen_funnel.jpg


I've also used drinking straws for HO-scale pipes.
 
Ken,
That is a pretty neat use of a funnel - I never would have known what it was if you didn't point it out. Drinking straws also make just the right size culvert pipes in HO.

Another cool thing is to take a paper flag and use some super glue to back it with aluminum foil. Once it's dry, you can bend the flag so it looks like it's blowing with the breeze.
 
What about the tops to deodorant sticks or the tops of shaving cream cans.

Man, when your mind gets going thinking of all the possible things laying around that you can use, it is scary.

One more, ball point pens. Take the ink tube and tip holder thingamabob out and that could be a pipe.

(it is a sickness...):D
 
The innards of a roll of calculator paper I use for biomedia in my pond filter. Yeah, its off topic, but any fellow aquarium or pond nut might appreciate this.
 
Find one of those women's craft shops. I made telephone pole loads out of a bag of sticks, beat them up a little, then a wash of grimy black and spray clearcoat over them to give them that creosote look. Small costume jewelry chain comes pretty useful, too, and a bag of floral arranging wire can be used for a lot of work that doesn't require the stiffness of .020 piano wire. I substituted bamboo skewers for the plastic shaft on telephone poles, thin dollhouse shingles make great scale plywood, sticks for lumber loads, thread thimbles and thin copper wire wrapped around them for wire spools. This stuff is CHEAP!
 
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