ADVANCED SKILLS AND TIPS

SCORING | TABBING | GLUE PATCHING | CURLING

TABBING

Tabs are the unseen parts of the design that hold the finished model together. Basic tabs are printed as part of each piece and serve as the glue areas. You see them along the edges of the printed pieces. These will be scored (along the dashed line) and folded, and then glue to the inner or outer face of an adjacent piece during assembly. "Inner" or "outer" differs from piece to piece, and is usually obvious by how how the pieces are intended to stand against one another.

Two principal types of advanced tabs are Slit tabs and Band-Aids.

Slit tabs are tabs that slide into slits cut into the face of another piece. They are then folded and glued to the inner surface of the receiving piece. This is usually done to preserve the illusion of wall meeting wall - especially where one wall ends at the corner fold of another wall - but can also be used to increase the strength of an area which will bear more than normal weight.

Band-Aids are tabs cut from scrap and glued to the invisible faces of pieces to hold them down or together. The principal use of band-aid tabs is to repair accidental cuts. Sometimes we cut too far through a score line or otherwise divide pieces where we didn't mean to cut them. In this case, a band-aid tab is usually UN-scored, unfolded, flat backing. If it is to repair a score line which was accidentally cut all the way through, then the band-aid will need to be scored to match the originally intended fold or corner.

Another common use of "Band-Aids" style tabs is to attach irregular shapes. A round tower is the perfect example of this. If you try to glue down a round tower with standard tabs (attached in flat design), the tower will buckle where the tabs are attached. This is because paper will fold and bend, but it will not stretch. When a standard tab is used on the bottom of a round piece, it will not allow the piece to curl properly in the radius of the curve. Instead, we cut a few band-aid tabs from scrap, attaching one end or face of the tab to the inner face of the round model piece, and the other end or face to the anchor point or area. Because we are cutting them from scrap, we can distort them and twist them and risk tearing them in the process...because we can always make more!