Blue Stuff??

Hi all.  I've not been that well lately, so have not been as active as I would have liked, especially with regard to doing stuff worthy of being posted here.

I have however, recently come across "Blue Stuff".

Now I'm aware that Blue Stuff has been around for a while, and many of you are like "Come on Richard - get with the times!".  I'd never really put 2 and 2 together before regarding it, nor thought of much of a use for it, until I realised I did need it and so I decided to jump in, get a small amount (the 4 pack shown above) and give it a go.

For those of you who have not seen it before, Blue Stuff is a thermo plastic moulding material.  Basically this means that when its heated (by being put into a mug of boiling water) it can be bent and moulded. Primarily the way to do this is by pressing it onto something you want a copy of, leaving it until it has cooled down.  Once cool, it retains the shape of the thing you have pressed it into.  Then you simply peel off the Blue Stuff and you are left with a mould.  Here's some examples I made in my first attempt:

It doesn't look like much, but it can work really, really well.  You then fill the mould with the material you want to create your copy with.  I used Green Stuff, but I'm sure other options are available.  I'm about to start stowing some USMC vehicles and you need loads of back packs etc, to give them the right look.  I've bought quite a lot of this kind of stowage, but it can get very expensive if you want it to look authentic.  I decided this was a better option for my stuff.  Here's some of what I've made with Blue Stuff:

Some of it came out great - like the 5 backpacks in the top row - and some not so great, like the big roll on the bottom far right.  Still it's useable I think.

Another trial was to help create some open hatches on some of my 3D prints.  Here's my Canadian Lynx's and some Dutch M113 C&V recon vehicles.  The drivers hatches on both the command vehicles has been fairly carefully drilled open by me, and then a Blue Stuff moulded hatch has been added.

I've also mounted .30 Cal MMGs to these Lynxes.

The hatches on these M113 C&V's is quite oddly shaped.  I'm really not sure how well it would have looked if I had tried to carve these out of plasticard.  I'm pretty happy with both of those particular vehicles.

I've no pics of this, but a while back I bought a Yak-38 Forger to support my Soviet Naval Infantry.  After having mostly built it I found I was missing a fairly critical bit of the model.  The whole project came to a grinding halt while I was trying to work out how to resolve this.  Just recently I found someone selling the exact same model, quite cheaply as it had no canopy.  I bought the model and have fitted the missing piece to existing kit.  Not before I cast that part in Blue Stuff and made a copy.  I also took my existing canopy a cast a copy of that as well.  Now I can make 2 Forgers!

I hope this shows some of the versatility of Blue Stuff and how you might be able to use it to assist you in your Cold War modelling.

Thanks

Richard