The Blue Peter Awards - show us your ingenuity

[CameronL]

Picture the scene. It's 1993 and Matchbox have released a set of the Thunderbirds craft, along with a model Tracy Island to house them. But disaster strikes! The suppliers can't keep up with the demand for said island. The country will be full of disappointed children!

 

Then along comes an unlikely superhero to save the day. In just ten minutes Blue Peter presenter Anthea Turner shows the country how to make their own Tracy Island out of simple household waste - yoghurt tubs, butter tubs, cereal packets, papier mache etc. The country is saved!

 

Now, I love modelling. My "Followed" list on RMWeb is long and varied. It spans from Colorado to China, from late Victorian to the present day, from 2mm finescale to 7/8, and the West Coast Mainline to the island of Sodor.

 

And I don't really care what techniques are used. Scratchbuilding from brass, 3D printing, kitbuilding, detailing RTR, or a good old bash. (I love the "Pugbashes" thread - if ever The Most Noble Order of the Bashed Pug is founded their rulebook will simply say "Rule 1 - there are no rules").

 

But I do have a special admiration for any piece of craftmanship arising out of something which was originally intended for another purpose. Someone who can look at SWMBO's discarded lipstick case, be reminded of that old N scale 0-6-0 chassis in the spares drawer and a week later have a new 00n9 loco running round.  

 

RMWeb is full of such work. So many people use coffee stirrers for a variety of purposes that I'm surprised you can't get them from Hatton's. 

 

So I think it's time for a thread to recognise the ingenuity needed to, in the great traditions of Blue Peter, turn simple household objects into useful, functional, and often beautiful models. 

 

If anyone sees or makes something that fits, let's see it posted here. Who knows, if it catches on we might even see among the "Like" options a little   , so the re-users among us can have their own Blue Peter badges. Until then a "craftmanship  / clever " will have to suffice.

Edited July 31, 2022 by CameronL
Added a bit

[CameronL]

I think I'll kick things off by nominating "Booking Hall", who's "Docks Away" layout began as a diversion during self-isolation. I love seeing the updates to this thread, and in fact his materials for building an oil storage tank were the inspiration for these awards. His thread, and its predecessor, "Brierley Canal Road", are full of such ingenuity.

[Northmoor]

Hear hear - not to belittle anyone who can build a locomotive kit successfully, but people who make impressive looking layouts out of waste materials are the greatest modellers of all IMO.

[33C]

More than once I have used the top of a poppy, with the stalk chopped off (the bit the paper petals/black boss goes into) as early GWR safety valve bonnets and yard lamps. Certain teeth retainers are great as traction tyres. Old telephoto camera's from the late 80s onwards can have up to 9 micro motors and gears inside, ideal for N gauge or small OO gauge loco's. 

[Fat Controller]

Paul Rolley has done some excellent 'upcycling' to produce a diorama of a chemical works.

[CameronL]

1 hour ago, 33C said:

More than once I have used the top of a poppy, with the stalk chopped off (the bit the paper petals/black boss goes into) as early GWR safety valve bonnets and yard lamps. Certain teeth retainers are great as traction tyres. Old telephoto camera's from the late 80s onwards can have up to 9 micro motors and gears inside, ideal for N gauge or small OO gauge loco's. 

That's worth a badge.

[Steamport Southport]

All made from sticky back plastic* and a pair of Val's old knickers!

 

 

 

I preferred Magpie myself.....  

 

 

 

*Sellotape to you and me. Just that they couldn't use a brand name on the BBC. Spent years looking for sticky backed plastic in the shops, if they had just said "tape" then we might have been able to make things.....

 

 

[33C]

I bought 3 multi packs of sticky back plastic, (white,black,red,yellow,blue and orange), very reasonably of Am+*×n and they are a boon for lining. Cut thin strips, peel off the backing and apply. The more you handle the model, the better it sticks. Did a whole  4 car, 357 unit in O gauge 10+ years ago, windows, doors, the lot, and it's as good today as it was then! (It's a training model and has helped many trainees over the years.) 

[33C]

Guitar strings are great for vacuum pipes, a 1 foot length of cooker wire gives you a lifetime supply of nice multi- thickness copper wire, an old piano has lots of nice thicknesses of wire for pick ups and point rodding, check any packaging for acetate in various thicknesses for glazing, seaside hand held windmills give a nice length of plastic tube and firework sticks are a good supply of square strip wood (sleepers,wooden platforms), model kit sprues should be kept, and if rolled in a flame to make soft and pliable, stretched lightly to make thick or thin pipe runs,handrails. If you cut a piece off, set light to one end briefly and push down onto a flat surface, can make a buffer. With practice you can make any size! 

[CameronL]

1 hour ago, Steamport Southport said:

I preferred Magpie myself

Magpie - 1968 to 1980

Blue Peter - 1958 to present day 

Magpie vs Blue Peter is like Monkees vs Beatles

 

(In a long career in the IT industry I often came across the term "to Blue Peter" for a prospective client,  which meant to develop something in advance for a demonstration in the hope of winning the business, as in "Here's one I made earlier." It really confused an American sales director, who obviously didn't get the cultural reference).

[CameronL]

And here's an award for John Besley. Who would think that this started life as bean tins? It seems that the humble bean tin really has a place in the world of railway modelling (particularly,  I suppose,  among garden railway enthusiasts, who spend a lot of time in the fresh air and are therefore better placed to cope with the aftermath of all the beans).

[Northmoor]

1 hour ago, CameronL said:

And here's an award for John Besley. Who would think that this started life as bean tins? It seems that the humble bean tin really has a place in the world of railway modelling (particularly,  I suppose,  among garden railway enthusiasts, who spend a lot of time in the fresh air and are therefore better placed to cope with the aftermath of all the beans).

It depends on the beans, surely?  If they were Heinz that's one thing, but if they were from Lidl or the Tesco Value range........

[RichardT]

On 30/12/2021 at 15:56, Steamport Southport said:

sticky back plastic*

Fablon, I think, was “sticky back plastic” in Blue Peter speak.  Sellotape was “sticky tape”. IIRC.  But yes, both also confusing for the primary-school age me trying to find the generic names in WH Smith’s in Coney Street on a Saturday in the early ‘70s.

 

Trying to get back OT, wasn’t most of the Blue Peter model railway an example of this kind of ingenuity? Well before Tracy Island!

 

RT

[The Johnster]

On 30/12/2021 at 16:33, 33C said:

Guitar strings are great for vacuum pipes, a 1 foot length of cooker wire gives you a lifetime supply of nice multi- thickness copper wire, an old piano has lots of nice thicknesses of wire for pick ups and point rodding, check any packaging for acetate in various thicknesses for glazing, seaside hand held windmills give a nice length of plastic tube and firework sticks are a good supply of square strip wood (sleepers,wooden platforms), model kit sprues should be kept, and if rolled in a flame to make soft and pliable, stretched lightly to make thick or thin pipe runs,handrails. If you cut a piece off, set light to one end briefly and push down onto a flat surface, can make a buffer. With practice you can make any size! 

 

Back in my misspent youth, I burned plastic sprue to use the soot as weathering under bridegs and archways. Be careful with this sort of thing, though, probably best done outside on a calm day with a bucket of water handy for if you need to get rid quickly!

 

Can I add coffee stirrers to this list; available at the right price from motorway services, supermarket cafes, Wetherspoons' and the like.  These have all sorts of potential uses, from stirring paint to hidden bracing on cut'n'shut coaches, lap fencing, and footboards on ersatz Dean bogies for Triang shorty clerestories (cut the tie bar out, cut a stirrer in half lengthways, trim to length and make cutouts for the axleboxes.  If you're happy with running a coach with the wrong number of compartments, this'll be good enough for you!).  And the plastic stems from cotton buds for your important little places, obvious pipe loads but also potential as pipes (!) and lamp posts.  I've some tolerable street lamps made of these and a string of led warm battery lamps cheap Chinese off the 'zon, you can feed the microwire up inside the stem, and back down again, and make a basic shade for the working lamp at the top.  The discs in the plastic tray underneath the hole cutter you use for paper to go in files are a good raw material. 

 

These disc chads may be suitable as route indicator discs (Southern and early diesel/electric locos) and duty targets as well.  Toilet tissue, the soft type, makes good net curtains inside model houses, matt varnish painted inside glazing is a pretty good representation of frosted glass, and if you really want to push the boat out, you can use cocktail sticks to scratch lettering or decoration in the frosted glass before the paint dries.  Cocktail sticks are useful for all sorts of handling and picking jobs, and perfect for cleaning out your flangeways, where crud can be a real running quality issue.  You can cut the pointy ends off and use them as pitprops, especially if you are making a stack for your colliery, but nice-smelly reed diffuser reeds look better as wagon loads when they have served their original purpose.  Pointy ends come in handy if your layout suffers from 4mm scale undead creatures of the night, but what did you expect when you put that gothic castle on the hilltop...

 

You can buy a plastic pot of Lego bricks and shapes in the Lego shop for £6, pot about 4inch dia. and the same high, any assortment of bricks you want until the lid won't go on the box, brilliant pick'n'mix deal.  Mostly standard size and half-size with a selection of 45degree angles and similar will be useful as formers and squares for kit assembly, and will have all sorts of other uses holding things up, making little jigs out of.  You can even use them as formers for buildings, make the shell out of Lego and detail with card overlays.  And the pot is handy for general storage of stuff like couplings, bearings, handrail knobs.

 

Poundshop kiddie's paintbrush sets, useless for painting, are stiff enough to be useful as general cleaners and will work in flangeways as well.  Cheapo poundshop tools or those chisels apparently made of pre-rotted mazak on 'zon from China are usually hopeless for their intended purposes, but as general levers, shapers, paint tin openers, weights to hold things down while the glue goes off they are peerless and save your good tools from this sort of abuse.  While you're in the pound shop, pick up a card of superglue, 8 tubes for a E1, which is just the thing for jobs like holding loco bodies to the chassis when you've lost the screws.  It is strong enough for you to pick the loco up by the bodyshell, but the bonding can easily be broken if you ever need to get inside the loco again, and, as with the cheapo tools, saves your good superglue for jobs where it's strength and durability is needed.

 

Appropos cheap stuff from China on 'zon, coach lighting with magetic switches at about a fiver a pop works every bit as well as Hornby's at 3 times the price.

[33C]

Watch/add to basket, for a week, and they will come back to you with an offer price, usually 33% less or a b.o.g.o.f. also, search the 'Bay for small, electric motors, not necessarily in toys/models. Found a Chinese company that supplies identical Hornby type motors, (loco and Scalextric), all sizes, 5 for a tenner. Buy more, they get cheaper still. Only drawback, 3 week delivery time. woopeedoo. At this price, I'll wait and they are fine!

[Axlebox]

Some 50 years ago we had a letter writing competition at school and 9 year old me wrote to Blue Peter suggesting they added some paper mache scenery to the Blue Peter model railway to make it more realistic (remember the BP model railway?)...well I got a reply from Biddy Baxter saying they would be including this in a future programme and I had been awarded a Blue Peter badge for my suggestion. Sadly though I didn't win the competition, despite my name being read out on a national kids tv progaramme, as 2 girls had written to the BBC and got an invite to Top of the Pops and a chance to meet Jimmy Saville...

 

I lost the Blue Peter badge over the years, however it turned up after my dads death, he had kept it in his tin of WWII medals.

[Enterprisingwestern]

12 minutes ago, Axlebox said:

Sadly though I didn't win the competition, despite my name being read out on a national kids tv progaramme, as 2 girls had written to the BBC and got an invite to Top of the Pops and a chance to meet Jimmy Saville...

 

I shudder to think what the 2nd prize was!

 

Mike.

[CameronL]

12 hours ago, The Johnster said:

 

Back in my misspent youth, I burned plastic sprue to use the soot as weathering under bridegs and archways. Be careful with this sort of thing, though, probably best done outside on a calm day with a bucket of water handy for if you need to get rid quickly!

 

Can I add coffee stirrers to this list; available at the right price from motorway services, supermarket cafes, Wetherspoons' and the like.  These have all sorts of potential uses, from stirring paint to hidden bracing on cut'n'shut coaches, lap fencing, and footboards on ersatz Dean bogies for Triang shorty clerestories (cut the tie bar out, cut a stirrer in half lengthways, trim to length and make cutouts for the axleboxes.  If you're happy with running a coach with the wrong number of compartments, this'll be good enough for you!).  And the plastic stems from cotton buds for your important little places, obvious pipe loads but also potential as pipes (!) and lamp posts.  I've some tolerable street lamps made of these and a string of led warm battery lamps cheap Chinese off the 'zon, you can feed the microwire up inside the stem, and back down again, and make a basic shade for the working lamp at the top.  The discs in the plastic tray underneath the hole cutter you use for paper to go in files are a good raw material. 

 

These disc chads may be suitable as route indicator discs (Southern and early diesel/electric locos) and duty targets as well.  Toilet tissue, the soft type, makes good net curtains inside model houses, matt varnish painted inside glazing is a pretty good representation of frosted glass, and if you really want to push the boat out, you can use cocktail sticks to scratch lettering or decoration in the frosted glass before the paint dries.  Cocktail sticks are useful for all sorts of handling and picking jobs, and perfect for cleaning out your flangeways, where crud can be a real running quality issue.  You can cut the pointy ends off and use them as pitprops, especially if you are making a stack for your colliery, but nice-smelly reed diffuser reeds look better as wagon loads when they have served their original purpose.  Pointy ends come in handy if your layout suffers from 4mm scale undead creatures of the night, but what did you expect when you put that gothic castle on the hilltop...

 

You can buy a plastic pot of Lego bricks and shapes in the Lego shop for £6, pot about 4inch dia. and the same high, any assortment of bricks you want until the lid won't go on the box, brilliant pick'n'mix deal.  Mostly standard size and half-size with a selection of 45degree angles and similar will be useful as formers and squares for kit assembly, and will have all sorts of other uses holding things up, making little jigs out of.  You can even use them as formers for buildings, make the shell out of Lego and detail with card overlays.  And the pot is handy for general storage of stuff like couplings, bearings, handrail knobs.

 

Poundshop kiddie's paintbrush sets, useless for painting, are stiff enough to be useful as general cleaners and will work in flangeways as well.  Cheapo poundshop tools or those chisels apparently made of pre-rotted mazak on 'zon from China are usually hopeless for their intended purposes, but as general levers, shapers, paint tin openers, weights to hold things down while the glue goes off they are peerless and save your good tools from this sort of abuse.  While you're in the pound shop, pick up a card of superglue, 8 tubes for a E1, which is just the thing for jobs like holding loco bodies to the chassis when you've lost the screws.  It is strong enough for you to pick the loco up by the bodyshell, but the bonding can easily be broken if you ever need to get inside the loco again, and, as with the cheapo tools, saves your good superglue for jobs where it's strength and durability is needed.

 

Appropos cheap stuff from China on 'zon, coach lighting with magetic switches at about a fiver a pop works every bit as well as Hornby's at 3 times the price.

Dangerously close to a gold badge for all these.

[CameronL]

3 hours ago, Axlebox said:

we had a letter writing competition at school and 9 year old me wrote to Blue Peter suggesting they added some paper mache scenery to the Blue Peter model railway to make it more realistic

I had a Blue Peter annual which showed in detail how to make papier mache mountains...

 

For Scalextric car tracks! They nicked your whole idea and recycled it.

 

My own innovation in the world of Blue Peter? If you use tension lock couplings a matt finish laminator pouch put through the laminator empty produces a stiff clear plastic sheet which is perfect for nearly invisible uncoupling ramps.

[CameronL]

3 hours ago, Enterprisingwestern said:

 

I shudder to think what the 2nd prize was!

 

Mike.

On a night when Gary Glitter was appearing.

[CameronL]

And another award to MrSimon, whose uses of a certain brand of cigarette paper far surpasses anything the manufacturers ever intended.

 

Not to mention some generally awesome building modelling.

Edited January 16, 2022 by CameronL
Added a bit

[Simon Lee]

Anyone else remember "How" on the opposition (ITV) ? 

 

They had a section called Rubbish Workshop, cant remember if it was Jack Hargreaves or Fred Dineage who did this section.

 

I was taken with a a working tramway street scene using a matchbox, string, two pencils, a paperclip, and " any long thin box" l was quite proud of my achievement, though the parents were bemused by the the pile of matches on the mantlepiece, and the sudden lack of pencils in the house.

 

 

[Steamport Southport]

1 hour ago, Simon Lee said:

Anyone else remember "How" on the opposition (ITV) ? 

 

They had a section called Rubbish Workshop, cant remember if it was Jack Hargreaves or Fred Dineage who did this section.

 

I was taken with a a working tramway street scene using a matchbox, string, two pencils, a paperclip, and " any long thin box" l was quite proud of my achievement, though the parents were bemused by the the pile of matches on the mantlepiece, and the sudden lack of pencils in the house.

 

 

 

How for now!

 

 

A little clip of the old show on here.

 

 

[CameronL]

And another badge to Darius43 for ingenious re-use of materials on his Middlemark thread.

[AyJay]

Warning! Slight digression coming up.

On the ‘re-purposing’ front, it amuses me that when searching for something to be used in a modelling application, the bemused expression of sales assistants is priceless.:

In the kitchen furniture store where I am looking at those odd hinges on cooker hoods - to be used as dampers in controlling the drop of a vertical entry flap on my layout “What make of kitchen have you got?”

Then theres in the pet shop looking at tubs of grit, to be used as the rock interior of a broken castle wall “what cage pet have you got?”

I have yet to be caught prowling around the make-up counter, looking for Trident missiles 😉

 

As for recycling, some of my wooden stirrers are now planks of wood on my lumberyard. If I ever go to a hotel, I have to keep those small glass pots that jam comes in; useful for putting small bits in.

Lastly, the foil bags inside boxes of M&S Teabags, line the roof insides of my buildings, to reflect light.