Disney Haunted Mansion Paper Model Floor Construction

Here are a couple of views of the Disney Haunted Mansion Paper Model that show some of the problems with working at a 200% enlargement.

Disney Haunted Mansion Paper Model Floor Construction

Here I am gluing the floor onto a piece of black foam core to give some structure to the model and to help keep the model straight. You can also see some of the difficulty in working at this size. The metal ruler is 15" long. The two black round things are a couple of heavy weights that I took off of a broken desk lamp. The round  coins in the back are $1 coins that I never spend (just don't like them) but they make great small weights for paper model work.

Disney Haunted Mansion Paper Model Floor Construction

Here I am attaching the floor to the bottom of the model. The floor glues inside the model and is held in place by gluing a tab running all the way around onto the inside of the walls. Here you see all of the paper clamps I am using to hold things together while it dries. You can also see some thumb tacks at the corners keeping things square. After this step I glued the whole thing onto a larger piece of black foam core to act as a final base. Of course the final base also has a hole cut in it to allow access to the inside for assembly and also to wire in some porch lights later on.

Starting the Disney Haunted Mansion Paper Model from Ray Kiem at 200%

I will be showing some build pictures of this model as I work on it. This won't be a step-by-step how to as the model comes with great instructions, but I will be showing some of the difficulties encountered due to the 200% scale up.

Disneyland New Orleans Square Haunted Mansion Paper Model from Haunted Dimensions and Ray Kiem. 200 % scale up

Just to give some scale, here is an early Disneyland Haunted Mansion Paper Model build picture, right after I connected the walls together. The model is sitting on my "Build Area" which is a cutting mat that is 11"x17", more than enough for most models, but this house completely fills the space. You can also see in this image a line running up through the middle of the right side windows, that is a seam where 8x11 sheets of cover stock were glued together to make the larger size needed for the model.

Roof segment from the Disneyland New Orleans Square Haunted Mansion Paper Model, gluing the pieces together.

To build the model at this size I imported the PDF document into Photoshop and enlarged it 200%, so what would normally fit on 1 8x11 sheet of cardstock now requires 4 8x11 sheets. I had to do some positioning to get as much important detail to fit onto each 8x11 sheet as possible, and then overlapped the sheets where possible along natural seams, like this roof ridge. I am using a heavy weight sitting on a 6" plastic ruler to keep the seam flat while the glue dries. Wish I had a large sale printer available.

Disneyland Haunted Mansion Paper Model, a look at the inside

Here is a shot looking at the inside of the Disneyland Haunted Mansion Paper Model walls. You can clearly see the seams in this shot. The square boxes are the window inserts. You can also see some of the warping of the walls caused by the thinness of the paper. Since the model is 200% larger, the card stock I am using is effectively 200% thinner than it would be on the regularly scaled model, so my model has some stiffness issues. These will mostly be solved when the balconies and roof are added, giving more stiffness to the model.

You can find the link for this model on the right side of my Blog, it is Haunted Dimensions. If you are a fan of Disneyland and the Haunted Mansion in New Orleans Square, then this is a must build.