
1:60 scale Boeing 777 made from manila folders - chha
https://www.lucaiaconistewart.com/model-777
======
hodgesrm
What an insanely beautiful model. It makes me happy to think that humans find
the time to do things that have no value beyond their beauty and the pleasure
they give to people who work on them.

~~~
airstrike
Second time I link to this video this month, but Sir Roger Scruton has a truly
impactful message on this subject:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHw4MMEnmpc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHw4MMEnmpc)

Can't find one without Portuguese subtitles, so hope that's OK

~~~
thih9
Is there a summary or could someone summarise the message for those who cannot
watch the video at the moment?

~~~
portroyal
This is the summary on the bitchute link:

Prof. Roger Scruton presents a provocative essay on the importance of beauty
in the arts and in our lives.

In the 20th century, Scruton argues, art, architecture and music turned their
backs on beauty, making a cult of ugliness and leading us into a spiritual
desert.

Using the thoughts of philosophers from Plato to Kant, and by talking to
artists Michael Craig-Martin and Alexander Stoddart, Scruton analyses where
art went wrong and presents his own impassioned case for restoring beauty to
its traditional position at the center of our civilization.

------
yreg
Since we are on this forum, I'll take a bite:

Carousels need to die. Everyone hates them, no one interacts with them unless
they have to. The carousel doesn't work for the user and it doesn't work for
the product.

[http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/](http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/)

[https://www.dgtlnk.com/blog/website-
carousel/](https://www.dgtlnk.com/blog/website-carousel/)

The plane model is nice.

~~~
colonwqbang
When you have a team of designers who can't agree on which image to put on the
frontpage, the dreaded carousel is frequently the result. The more bitter
their disagreement, the shorter the timeout on the slideshow.

~~~
colmvp
Designers? From my experience as a designer, it's almost never the actual
designer who wants it. It's competing stakeholders.

------
ishi
Building paper airplane models was a very popular hobby in Israel (and
probably other countries) during the 1960's. Each issue of the Israeli Air
Force Journal came with a model which you would painstakingly cut and glue.
Here are some examples of what these models looked like: [http://starry-
side.com/wpe/wordpress/index.php/2019/08/08/ol...](http://starry-
side.com/wpe/wordpress/index.php/2019/08/08/old-card-models-from-holland/) Of
course, this guy is on a whole different level of detail and dedication (plus
he designs everything himself). Amazing work.

~~~
p_l
Was also very popular in communist era Poland, including people extending the
paper models to be capable of self-propelled taxiing and certain set of
"moveable" features implemented as extras.

~~~
malkia
Same thing in Bulgaria. One good side of "communism" was free modeling clubs
for kids like me, so we've got rocket modelling (made 2, even 3 phase rockets
while 3rd-4th grade), plane modelling (balsa wood, rice paper, etc.) - all for
free - you pay for neither materials, nor courses, later it was computers
(that's how I got into them). Before that also slot cars racing, ship
modelling, there was even knot-making club (our city is on the black sea, so
makes sense - future sailors!)

I mean, even if communism is evil, there were some good things - way overpay,
or pay anything for clubs that should've been free to begin with and get kids
into them... It doesn't take much to support them compared to many other
things...

~~~
errantspark
Czech Republic, reporting in! I'm too young to remember much of communism but
I remember the balsa and rice paper gliders I built with my grandpa very
fondly. There's something so fantastic about the fragile beauty of those
planes with their skeletons visible beneath that translucent skin.

There's a magazine in the Czech Rep. called ABC which always had plans for
some sort of papercraft model in the back. I used to love them as a kid.

[https://www.abicko.cz/kategorie/6333/navody-z-
abc](https://www.abicko.cz/kategorie/6333/navody-z-abc)

------
siavosh
Request - any books/articles anyone can recommend on the human mind's
instinctive need to become obsessed with something? Periodically, like many
others, my mind becomes obsessed with something and I need to learn/build
until it ceases to be interesting which can range from days to years. Like
hoarding, I think there's probably an evolutionary drive in this, but curious
if there are good resources to better understand the different attributes of
wanting to learn/do something to 'irrational' levels of details whether it's
something seemingly inconsequential or consequential, which seems irrelevant
to this human drive. So much joy has come out of these periods of obsessions,
I'm curious to better understand it's source.

~~~
philshem
I don’t think it explains much in a scientific sense, but with the theme of
passion and obsession, I really enjoyed The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orchid_Thief](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Orchid_Thief)

And this famous quote from that book:

> “The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are
> too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was
> starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about
> something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It
> makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility."

Edit: before the book was the New Yorker article, if you want to “try before
you buy” [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/01/23/orchid-
fever](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1995/01/23/orchid-fever)

~~~
siavosh
Thanks for the interesting reference. The drive to reduce uncertainty could
certainly be a hypothesis in explaining animal curiosity and its persistence
through natural selection for a population.

I guess I'm more intrigued by the individual phenomena of obsession. The
psychological aspects of my occasional obsessions are so vivid to me still.
Years back when I got into woodworking, for example, I remember just
visualizing as I fell asleep the use of hand planes and the pursuit of getting
thinner and thinner shavings. Then I got into bread baking and I pursued
everything I could for the ultimate oven spring, I would then start
visualizing the reveal of the bread out of the oven. Then I got into
mechanical watches (thankfully briefly) and couldn't stop reading about them,
and relevant imagery kept popping into my head, etc etc etc.

My world, priorities, value systems all just made sense in those periods which
spanned months to years. Then inevitably when I moved on, I would look back
and I couldn't relate or understand the obsession anymore. I'd transition from
an insider to an outsider looking at it. It always surprises me how that
transition, into and out of, an obsession alienates you from yourself.

~~~
z2210558
This is beautiful.

------
cheerlessbog
As a young adult I could absorb myself in projects like this...in recent
years, mid career, it just doesn't seem to happen. I can't make myself care
enough about anything to the extent it's very hard to imagine how someone
could do anything like this project. Anyone have a suggestion for how to find
that again? Maybe I lost the ability to focus on anything I'm not required to
do to get paid. Or maybe I'm mildly depressed and don't know it...how does
someone do this?

~~~
beenBoutIT
Stimulants and/or a psychiatric disorder that causes boundless energy. What
you're not seeing is the crash and subsequent time-lapse footage of him
sleeping for 5 solid days after.

~~~
wil93
"The project has been in progress since May 2008"

He really just enjoys doing it :)

~~~
beenBoutIT
Wow, that's impressive.

------
AtOmXpLuS
Everything in
([https://atomxplus.com[AtOmXpLuS]](https://atomxplus.com\[AtOmXpLuS\])

------
rkagerer
He had me at this door hinge mechanism:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8M-3dK4h1Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8M-3dK4h1Q)

And the steerable, retracting landing gear is phenomenal.

------
jacquesm
I've gone down this particular rabbit hole before, it's pretty deep. Make sure
to view the landing gear timelapse. Crazy attention to detail. I can't help
myself and wonder if you'd stick a couple of ducted fans in it and a remote
control whether it would fly.

------
scotty79
Apparently manila folders are sheets of stiff paper folded in half. They look
like folder icon in windows or other OSes. I have never seen one in real life.
:-)

~~~
c3534l
Hour glass, floppy disk, envelope, AA style battery for laptops, and now
manilla folders go on the pile of icons that are too abstract for people to
recognize anymore. What next, people won't recognize the sheet of paper for
document anymore? Clipboards are probably already weird now.

~~~
caf
Even electric vehicles use the AA style battery metaphor in their UI.

~~~
kevingrahl
Perhaps not the best example for how abstract something is. The 18650 battery
cells that most electric vehicles use looks very similar to an AA battery. You
certainly couldn’t tell them apart from an icon.

~~~
caf
A fair point. Do the lithium cells have the protruding button on the positive
end?

~~~
kevingrahl
Apologies for the late reply, only just saw your question. In case you haven’t
answered it yourself: Some appear to have the “button top” that you know from
AA’s but most appear to omit those. But even those without the button top have
a smaller contact on the positive side similar to the button top.

------
ncmncm
I will always upvote this.

My brother worked out the landing gear articulation, with mechanical locking;
previous Boeings had complicated hydraulic valving to make the gear stop
moving at the bottom, with the failure mode that it immediately folds back in.

Here's hoping some of the 777s are chosen for hydrogen-fuel conversion. A 2-4
year job for a dozen A/Ps, by my guess. Aerogel-insulated LH2 tank amidships,
all new fuel piping, new or reconfigured engines, for tens of tons more
payload, and ultimately all wind- and solar-powered.

------
GekkePrutser
This is absolutely beautiful!!

It speaks for his mindset as I would not have the patience to finish something
like this. Besides skill, there's a high amount of perseverance and focus
needed that most people don't have. Wow!

~~~
bookofjoe
See also: Bryan Berg, world's greatest card stacker
[https://www.cardstacker.com/](https://www.cardstacker.com/)

------
m3at
If you're interested in getting started with paper crafts like this, PePaKuRa
[1] is a great software that takes care of all the 2D shapes arrangements and
addition of padding for gluing pieces together.

[1] [https://tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/](https://tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/)

------
yla92
What a great story. I was wondering if a story about this guy have been posted
before and indeed, it was.

A Kid Spent 9 Years Building a Detailed Paper Model of a Boeing Jet (2017)

\-
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19448365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19448365)

The great takeaway for me from the story is his quote related to how he did
all these things.

"I was not born with these skills, I developed them over time. And the
original model was actually pretty crude. And I've really learned a lot over
the past number of years, and that's how I've gotten to where I am at now."

------
aiisahik
Someone get this guy a job at Boeing. He seems like a better engineer than
some of the people making real planes.

~~~
anonymousiam
What do you have against him? After having worked at Boeing for 35 years, I
would never recommend it to anyone I cared about.

~~~
omarchowdhury
Why not? Tell us your story.

~~~
rs23296008n1
I think we have enough to guess with reasonable accuracy.

------
rezeroed
Nevermind the model - those Illustrator skills!

------
acqq
"Making of" landing gear:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77oRSCxGmYA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77oRSCxGmYA)

"Gear Stats:

•3 months' work between design and build (early June - early September). About
a month per side.

•Over 200 hours of work total (design+build).

•Over 1,000 parts per side (not including the wheels), for a total well over
2,000.

Video Stats:

•Over 600GB of raw footage/130 hours.

•Editing took 2 weeks.

•Video was sped up 100-200x.

•Produced in Final Cut and Motion."

------
nerfhammer
Lots of good videos by and about this guy
[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=luca+iaconi-
ste...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=luca+iaconi-stewart)

------
interger
Reminds me of someone who makes car scale models mainly out of silver:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSS7uBzDOio](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSS7uBzDOio)

------
dh5
Absolutely incredible. I clicked on the link expecting nowhere near that level
of detail. One of the pictures even shows individual wires on the landing
gear. I'm thoroughly impressed by the dedication here.

~~~
jdnier
And one of the wires is even coiled!

------
holler
This blew my mind, wow! The level of detail is surreal, especially the cabin,
wings, and wheels. Feels like looking at a manilla 3d rendering...

------
Causality1
It's always struck me as bizarre that it's the convention to refer to length
when using the word "scale". When I read it my mind is naturally inclined to
think "volume" and I have to remind myself that 1:60 scale does not mean the
model is 1/60 the size of the original.

~~~
detaro
Curious if you feel the same about scale on maps, or does your mental model
work differently there?

~~~
Causality1
Not sure. I've never heard someone say or write "this is a 1:50 scale map" or
something of the sort.

------
justinclift
Wonder if the SpaceX team should have a chat with the designer about trying a
Falcon 9 or Heavy next? :)

~~~
rtkwe
Doing a model rocket would be tougher there's a lot of bits they just couldn't
show him due to ITAR restrictions. Also beyond the engines rockets are a LOT
of empty space, there is some interesting structure in the skin but most of
the volume is just empty. Destin from Smarter Every Day did a tour of the ULA
factory where you can see the skin that provides a lot of the structure for
their rockets.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0fG_lnVhHw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0fG_lnVhHw)

~~~
justinclift
Cool video, thanks. :)

------
kiba
I got a bunch of manila folder after being inspired...but I proceed to do
nothing with it.

------
rtkwe
Wonder how they're doing. Their socials linked on their site are all from 2-3
years ago. Followed this early and I think he may have mostly finished.

------
awinter-py
vector art layout step is surprisingly manual! I wonder if there's a market
for a CAD tool that focuses on creating 2D cutouts for 3D models

~~~
_jal
Not exactly what I think you're thinking of, but there's enough of a market
for this to exist:

[https://www.vectric.com/products/cut2d-pro](https://www.vectric.com/products/cut2d-pro)

More generally, modeling software tends to also handle sheet metal fabrication
(closest to what you're thinking of) and surface modeling just fine.

~~~
ansible
Interesting product, seems like a nice 2D CAD/CAM package.

Is there CAD software that helps you design a 3D product out of 2D parts? It
didn't seem like this would really help with that.

------
code4tee
Great job. Handmade detailed models are always very impressive. Making it out
of an odd material makes even more interesting.

------
rglover
In a romantic sense, I'd like to think this is what trust fund recipients do
with their time.

------
d_silin
I wonder, if you fit some kind of propulsion and controls - will the model
become flyable enough?

~~~
schoen
I don't think that was part of the intent - the weight and structural strength
is probably a problem (including the strength of the glue joints), and the
aerodynamics (because the connections between segments aren't airtight). The
materials that the real plane is made of will have properties that are more
suitable for a flying object.

------
zod50
Why is this particularly Air India though? Is the Boeing 777 different for
other airlines?

~~~
LittlePeter
I do not know, but my guess is that it is related to the cabin layout.

Each airline typically orders a quite specific arrangement of classes and
seats which almost surely are unique to an airline.

As to why Air India? Maybe he found a detailed 3D model of their chairs and
cabin layout? Or maybe their cabin layout is particularly easy to model?

Sorry for the drivel, just felt the urge to share my speculation.

~~~
nirmalc
He mentions about that here : [https://www.ge.com/news/reports/try-this-at-
home-this-kid-bu...](https://www.ge.com/news/reports/try-this-at-home-this-
kid-built-an-incredibly-detailed-model-of-a-boeing-777-from-cut-up-paper-
folders) "I also happened to find the highly-detailed Air India seat map
online, which made it easier to design the interior."

------
Hoasi
This level of dedication is so inspiring.

------
greg7mdp
This guy has truly mastered 3d printing!

------
jcun4128
damn, the amount of time that must have taken, the landing gear and the wing
ribs are insane

------
hindsightbias
Even the thrust reverser works

------
abluecloud
this guy is hilarious.

------
eloff
The level of detail, thought, and painstaking effort behind creating this
model is incredible. I imagine it was a fun or cathartic hobby for this
person, but man when you think of what else they could have accomplished with
a similar level of effort. They could be in a substantially better place
financially, which probably would have been more valuable to them personally.
If not, then by all means it is time well spent.

Some people would counter that money is not everything, which I mostly agree
with. But it can be traded for time, in as much as you are currently trading
time for money in a hateful device called a job. And everyone knows that time
is both valuable and limited.

That's my opinion, I can't justify time consuming hobbies like this one.

Still, it's a beautiful work of art and the creator should be justifiably
proud of it.

~~~
paracyst
On today's episode of "Stop Liking Things That I Don't Like"

~~~
eloff
Not at all, just puzzled why people do things like this that don't seem to
better their situation.

Unless he's doing exactly what he would really want to do with his free time,
in which case it is optimal.

~~~
jimktrains2
I mean, why does anyone have any hobbies? Why do people build model layouts,
or models at all? Why read/write for fun? Why keep small gardens? Why do
photograhy? Why do people still run their own dark rooms? Why do people write
software in their spare time? Why do people cook?

~~~
indemnity
This strain of thinking that every spare minute must be accounted for and be
in the service of improving one’s circumstances is something all too common in
tech.

We’re not ants.

~~~
jimktrains2
It's also a very narrow idea of what someone's "circumstances" are. Physical
and mental well-being are part of your circumstances as well, and hobbies
often cater to one or both of those.

------
fredfjohnsen
Just going to be very, very disappointed if it doesn't actually fly...

~~~
_benj
Even if it did I wouldn't fly it!

After flying some RC models myself the chances of crashing it are way too high
and without replaceable parts... Idk, pretty risky!

------
schmilk
This community is so weird/random

------
SillaDeRuedas
I can't believe this silly thing is in the frontpage.

~~~
schmilk
It's the hacker news "culture". As much as this site loves to hate on reddit
(and I don't disagree with reddit hate), this community has its own cringe and
pretentiousness which can be seen in silly articles like this reaching the
front page.

Edit for the downvoters: what does this article have to with technology
besides the fact that some self proclaimed hacker thinks this article is
interesting? This isn't hacker news, this is an attempt at hacker "community"
and all the off topic articles are so random it makes me cringe and not visit
this site anymore. This site comes off as a lifestyle magazine anymore.

~~~
dahart
I didn’t downvote, but just to explain what I see here: you used negative
value judgements with words like “cringe” and “pretentious”, and then your
question assumes that HN articles must be about technology.

It’s worth re-reading the guidelines, because the definition of what’s invited
and acceptable here is (and always has been) precisely that which hackers find
interesting:

“On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes
more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the
answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.”

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Also, stories don’t get to the front page on their own. They get there when a
lot of people upvote them. Since your insults are directed at the people that
upvoted this, and are being read by the people that upvoted this and visited
the comments section, downvotes are quite predictable. It’s perhaps a good
idea to upvote the things you like, and visit those comment sections instead
of complaining.

~~~
schmilk
Why would I spend anymore time on this cringey lifestyle magazine? Site used
to be alright. I've said my complaint, responded to you, and now I'm gone

