Hello All
This was to have been my entry in the 6.KBW, but I looked again at the rules, and found that it will not be eligible as scaling is not allowed. This will therefore have to be an ordinary contruction report.
The prototype is an off-road trail bike which has been manufactured in slightly varying versions since 1985, and is still available, at least in Japan.
The model is a free download from Eastern's Toybox (http://www.saturn.dti.ne.jp/~eastern) which appeared in January to join his large selection of rally cars and aircraft. It has 9 A4 pages containing a little under 300 parts, and is at scale 1:8. There are four pages of diagrammatic instructions with some Japanese text on them. Unfortunately the instruction PDF file is locked to prevent text extraction, so it is not possible to present the text to an online translator.
A first inspection of the parts file showed good clear computer graphics, but with rather heavy black outlines suggesting possible problems with light-coloured parts. Conversely, fold lines show very little contrast against the part colouring, particularly on the dark green of the frame, fuel tank and seat.
I wish this to match my collection of motorcycle models from Yamaha in scale. As nearly as I can tell those are scale 1:7, and I have made them half-size, so I constructed high-resolution bitmaps at a relative scale of 8:14, or 57%. I do not have a capable vector picture-processing program, or expertise in using one, so I do any manipulation necessary on the bitmap. In this case, I toned down the black outlines around light-coloured parts to a mid grey before printing the pages. I haven't printed the two pages containing the wheel hubs and spokes, as I think I shall have to use a different technique to build the wheels in this scale.
More soon,
Alan