Alrighty! Let's start our trashy little tutorial with a happy face and some "googly" or "wiggly" eyes as found in the craft store -- you can get a pack of assorted sizes for a buck or so, and they're handy when you need little dome shapes, domed lenses ... or trash can lids!
These little wiggly eyes used to be pressed together, but now they seem to heat-seal them. Tried using a razor blade to slice them, but found that a little
photo-etched saw worked much better. I got an assortment of these from an ebay seller (search "DreamModel Photo Etched Saw) ... or you can find an assortment of other brands by searching "saw" on
www.BnAModelWorld.com in Australia. (Good place to see a fair selection; just placed my first order with them a few days ago -- so can't report on delivery time just yet!)
I put the little saw blade on a scrap of .040" styrene as shown in previous photo and turned the wiggly eye against that to get a good groove all the way around as shown above left -- then proceeded to cut through and sand the edges with a very fine sanding stick.
Originally, I was planning to use the domed portion for the can lid ... and that would make a handy, simpler solution for the smaller scales. But, after I cut the wiggly eyes, I liked the bottom half better for a can lid ... and worked out the embossing pattern as shown above right.
For reference, I used 18mm wiggly eyes for my 1/35 scale can lids -- they're about 2' scale diameter.
Embossing the lids: Used a circle cutter (found at craft store) to cut a disk of .010" styrene to fit inside the bottom part of the wiggly eye and used a paper punch to put hole in the center of that. Used some rubber-tipped tweezers to hold that inside the wiggly eye lid ...
Then used a cheap mechanical pencil with .5mm lead to emboss the circle. The plastic is quite sturdy on these little eyes, so you have to start lightly and work up with increasing pressure. Also, found this works much better on a piece of cardboard (as found on back of a notepad) than a rubber mat -- you need some "give" in the material underneath to allow the embossing to work. After the circle was done, I hand-drew the radial lines and traced over those repeatedly with increasing pressure until they looked okay from the opposite side. The embossing changes the shape of the originally-flat lid to a nice little "pressed steel" dome as shown at far right.
The mysterious case of "invisible" trash cans! Figured it would be easier to see what I was doing with the embossing if I could see thru the material being used, so I grabbed some of this stuff ... and it worked quite well in that regard. If you want to make
dented or dinged trash cans, you might want to try .005" styrene sheet, heavy foil, etc., as this material is hard to shape in that regard.
Height: Made my cans about 30" scale height -- they come in lots of different sizes, and that just looked good to me!
Length of wrapper: Should be Pi (3.14) x diameter of the tubing that you use inside (see below), plus a little extra to allow for overlap and gluing the edges (about 1mm will do). Since I don't have a decimal ruler handy, I found it easiest to measure the diameter of my core tubing in millimeters, multiply that by 3.14 and determine the length needed ... then mark that with a metric ruler.
Emboss the horizontal lines: Marked out the dimensions on the clear stock and taped that to a piece of Evergreen #2025 V-groove siding (.025" spacing). Used the mechanical pencil to LIGHTLY emboss each line, then repeated each again with a little more pressure. It takes a little practice to get the right amount for the desired effect, so it pays to practice embossing on a scrap piece before starting.
And, if somebody's repeating this exact process in 1/35 scale ... the top band is 1 groove below the top of the wrapper (red rectangle), second band is 1 groove below that ... then skip 3 grooves and make 2 more bands. Bottom bands are 2 and 3 grooves above bottom edge.
Not sure how much you can put in a single post here ... so hang on a minute ...
