Ken Long

YEARS AGO, when my brother was 14 and I was 12, he hit on the idea of building airplanes using Tinker ToyTM frames, then cutting and pasting various thickness of paper from magazines covers and cereal boxes. Of course, these models were too flimsy to fly, but we thought they looked great - and it was a lot of fun creating something with my brother. After 40-plus years of building stick-and-tissue balsa, plastic, and foam airplanes (mostly Control Line Scale), I decided to try paper once again. I had built several practice models from corrugated paper box material. They flew well, but when covering the outside, this material had to be scored on the inside to go around the curve. This produced more of an octagonal look rather than a smoothly contoured surface. This lead to the idea of using paper of various calipers (thicknesses) and weights to produce a Scale model that would more closely resemble the subject prototype.