HOW TO MAKE A MIG-21  OUT OF AGARBATTI TUBE.

Question: Whats an Agarbatti?
Answer : Check this. Now you know whats an Agarbatti is! Its an incense stick used in India..It used to (and still does) comes in Cylindrical cardboard boxes.

Question : Why make a cardboard MiG-21 out of the Agarbatti Tube?
Answer: 1. Because we did not used to get modelling kits in India in the early 90s
             2. Because I had plenty of time on my hands to do something..and i mean PLENTY OF TIME 
             2. Because a Sten Gun would be quite small with the material in hand.

Question : What material did you use to make the model?
Answer: The Agarbatthi box, Tin foil from the Red Label Tea Packets, Glue, cardboard, markers.

Modus Operandi.

I came across this cylindrical tube of cardboard that was used to package the Agarbatti sticks. I was toying around with making a dummy cardboard Sten Gun, but then thought that if I had to make a Sten, i better make it 1:1 Scale and the material i have is not useful for a full size model. So I decided to make a MiG-21 out of it. Better said than done!. The MiG-21s fuselage was not exactly cylindrical, even though the Su-7 was  a better choice, the daunting prospect of fashioning a bubble canopy out of cardboard finally convinced me to make the Fishbed.

some of the main challenges are creating the spine. this involved "pinching" the box into shape then cutting one side of it to make the nose, and cutting away the spine at the other end to make the tail. Both the tail and nose had to be spliced and joined again to give the tapering appearance. The wings , fin and tailplanes were a cinch, cut out of some hard cardboard, drawn to scale it fit in well with the fuselage and gave a good appearance. 

The next difficult task was the paint. I decided to use aluminium foil/paper. Only one problem, it aint so easy to get aluminium foil in early 90s in Hyderabad. then an idea stuck, the tea powder box in the kitchen had the aluminum paper lining on the inside.  So it took two boxes and four months (to consume the Tea!) to get enough aluminium paper to cover the aircraft. The paper was cut into individual panel sizes to give the appearance of metal sheets!. Finally the model was 90% done.. and i lost interest........

Remind me to tell you guys on how I made three dimensional cardboard Hawker Hurricane....thats another story..90% complete!

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