While Steven’s method works well, I find that even the heavy duty household foil, is too fragile for my perhaps heavy hands.
I devised a way to roll .05 foil through brass rollers with a corrugated pattern machined onto them. The idea worked, but my Sherline vertical mill has too much deflection in it and each rotation of the cross slide hand wheel left a funny (not laughing) pattern in the corrugations, and it came out on the foil too.
This was a very labor and time consuming attempt. The current pieces are a bust, but there were useful lessons learned. I have a big chunky harbor freight mill someone gave me in the garage. When I get back in the mood, more experimenting.
The idea is to be able to roll out bulk quantities of good looking HO material quickly and easily, as I have some projects calling for huge quantities. Dan
I found that cheap cookie sheet or cake pans at the dollar store are heavier than even heavy duty aluminum foil but light enough to take an impression. I took Lion’s idea of printer ribbons but used them as the mold and ran down each line with a kabob skewer on top of the aluminum to make the corrugations. Takes awhile but works great. The other ideas submitted should work as well with this lightweight aluminum.
There actually is a pre made corrugated tin gig that you can buy. The youtube channel Luke Towan uses it, but the price is also ridiculous. A really great way to make it (I saw this on youtube too) is to take a bolt or screw and roll the threads along your strip of material. Voila! And if you need bigger or smaller corrugations, just use a bolt with wider or narrower threading.
I thought tooth paste tube squeezers went away with the metal tooth paste tubes. I see they also have a $40 squeezer. No doubt about it, if I’m paying $40 for a tooth paste squeezer, I’m buying the $600 ProtoThrottle. [:D]
I used a $7 toothpaste roller from Amazon. Works great and when I laid the aluminum result over HO scale corrugated I had here, it matched up perfectly in the grooves of the expensive store bought corrugated.
I used disposable foil pans to cut strips of the size I wanted and rolled it through the toothpaste squeezer.
And badda bing, badda boom! In less then five minutes I had enough corrugated for ten roofs or walls (think junkyard).
For the walls, I reinforced them with scale basswood strips. For the roofs, I used PVA to glue them in place, and then proceeded to use Rustall to give it the rusted look I wanted.
I prefer to use “corrugated” sheet styrene. Not only does if give you the desired surface finish but it doubles as the structural component. It’s difficult to damage, too. Want the look of individual panels? Just scribe the styrene to define the panel edges. Add paint and rust-colored weathering approaching the lower edge of each (or some) panel(s) and you’ll catch your layout visitors touching your structure trying to determine whether it’s really individual metal panels or not.
Many years ago in the kinks column in MR it was suggested that using a file for the base and a piece of wood drawn across the aluminum foil on top of the file would create corrugated siding.
I think that was the method used by Jack Work for his famous coal mine model. There was no commercial alternative back then.
It lasted very briefly but there was a make of cigarette that came in a plastic pack that had corrugations of about the right size for HO, and guys would cut out the packs and use the pieces for corrugated siding and roofs. It might have been Lark cigarettes …
Dave Nelson