Worm-Rolled Parts

Remember when we were kids and played with modeling clay or Play-Doh. You could make narrow worms by rolling the worms under your fingers.

I have been experimenting with doing the same with paper. When wet (and gluey), paper has some of the same plasticity as modeling clay and play-doh. Why not roll worms made out of paper to make solid, very narrow cylinders? I think it works great for bitt-posts and similar structures.

For the Krakus, I used this technique for the following parts:

The bit-posts and the rudder shaft parts were cut out from thin (1/10mm) paper:

(Shown in scale; click to see actual sheet with 4-times resolution.)

After cutting out the parts, I wet them, smeared glue on the inside and rolled them up as tightly as I could. Then (while still wet) I used the worm rolling technique to narrow the worms down to 1 mm. Here is one of the bitt-post worms being rolled:

After the worms were completely dry, I cut the bitt-posts to length and cut the rudder shaft to fit. I then touched up the cut ends with watercolors. I needed more strength for the rudder shaft, so I soaked it in cyanoacrylate glue.

The swabbing crewman's mop handle was worm-rolled from a tiny, wet sliver of paper. After it dried, I stained it with a brown felt-tip-marker and cut it to fit.