3D Notre-Dame de Paris Puzzle

For Christmas my husband got me a really cool, incredibly detailed, 3D model/puzzle for Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral.  I spent the last 2 weekends putting it together. It's by a company called Cubic Fun.

The pieces are printed on each side of thin foamboard, which you punch out of cards. There's also a card of printed acetate windows and double sided tape pieces for putting the windows in.

The puzzle/model starts by putting the west facade together. I was amazed by the number of pieces each step took.

The doors look so real, with a piece of foamboard for each layer of statuary. It looks amazing. And they got the pictures for the sculpture right - so each door has the proper tympanum and archivolts (sculpture above and around the door), rather than the same images printed 3 times. The rose windows are also different, though the other windows are copies of the same image.

 Next were the two sides, and all their flying buttresses.

Here's one side done, roof and all.

The finished cathedral looks incredible and is quite large. My cat walked around it while I was taking pictures, giving a sense of scale. Closed, it's over a foot high and at least a foot and a half long.

It even opens up so you can see the interior aisles and tiny altar.

3D Metal Model: Kinkakuji

Last weekend I built another 3D metal model, this time of Kinkakuji, the Japanese golden pavilion in Kyoto.

This one contained 3 golden metal sheets for building the model (usually you get 1 or 2 sheets). As far as building went, this was one of the easier models I've done. I did mess up and thought I'd put the phoenix on the room facing the wrong direction so I 'fixed' it. I thought the outbuilding was the front, and once I'd bent and unbent the flaps once I didn't want to mess with them again for fear of breaking them off.

Like the other models I've done this one looks incredible finished. The real Kinkakuji is even more beautiful:

3D Metal Puzzle: Airship

I've been doing these metal 3D puzzles for a while now and while they're difficult at times I really enjoy putting them together. They also look fabulous when done.

I bought this airship model off the internet and spent several hours yesterday building it.

First off, the set itself was great, shiny metal with etched details on one side. While the instructions were in Chinese, I've got English ones that I could compare them to to figure out the important notes (which side should be etched, folding the tab over or twisting it). So that was fine.

The first problem came in when I realized that just getting some of the pieces off the sheets was going to be difficult without breaking them. Well, I broke... quite a few pieces. I've had one or two breaks in the past, usually fixed with some crazy glue. Not this time. While some of the breaks aren't really noticeable the others... also aren't noticeable because you don't have a reference photo to compare it to when you're displaying it. Keeping that in mind kept me from becoming too frustrated while making this. In fact, I came up with the narrative that it had just been in a space battle to excuse the parts you could notice didn't look quite right.

Here are some shots of the build in progress.

 Towards the end things got... rather impossible. The front has 2 layers of overlapped metal. To get the front base piece in I'd have had to push down one of those layers to uncover the slot, while somehow slotting the base inside and around to get the tabs into place. There aren't many safe handholds, so this was a challenge. I gave up when the base broke in half. Well, actually I thought I could glue that break and while I was prepping it for glue it broke along another line. Who looks at the underside of a model anyway?

A few pieces broke or broke off and had to be repaired/glued into place. Two side pieces were so impossible to place that I just didn't bother. And attaching the top side layers meant damaging upper work as I tried to crimp the tabs into place.

Definitely a pain in the neck to build and by far the worst in terms of things breaking and fitting together properly. (You can see some of the broken/unused pieces in the photos below.)

But...

Doesn't it look gorgeous? Sometimes we aim for perfection and miss the beauty of what's actually there.

Skyrim Skeletal Dragon Kit

For a while now I've wanted some sort of winged skeleton statue, whether it be a bat or a dragon, something that looked cool. Just before Christmas I found this Skyrim Skeletal Dragon kit on clearance (so the price was right too!).

The pieces came attached to a plastic frame. I wanted this to look good, so after snapping the pieces off the plastic I carefully scraped the attachment nubs off with an xacto knife.

Not all of the pieces wanted to fit together closely - one of the tail pieces and the jaw gave me some trouble - but the finished statue looks amazing.

Now to find a proper display space...

3D Metal Millennium Falcon Model

I got my husband a 3D metal model pirate ship last year and loved how it turned out.  Well, for Christmas he got a few more of these metal puzzles, and here's the Millennium Falcon.  The pieces fit together using tiny tabs that go into slots and must be either folded over or twisted.  My husband found the tabs hard to manipulate (for fear of breaking them and due to curves, etc.) so I got to make this one for him.  :D

Here's the 2 metal sheets the pieces come in with the instructions and the top of the ship partially done.

And here's the completed model.  It looks really cool.  The company did a great job of etching the metal so the finished ship has a lot of detail. 

The tabs are a bit hard to manipulate (sometimes one tab won't fit while all the others are in and it's hard to coax it into its hole without popping the others out), and doing curves was kind of tough.  The model itself took somewhere around 2 hours to complete, but once I got the hang of it, it was a lot of fun.  My only real complaint was that using pliers to bend the tabs down scuffed the metal plates, which looks fine on the Millennium Falcon (as it's supposed to be a beat up ship), but wouldn't look so great on some of the other models they produce.

The same company does some Star Trek models too.  I'm thinking of asking for the U.S.S Enterprise for Christmas this year.