BILDRUMS JULMODELLER

Christmas models to download

Please observe that you are allowed to download files from this page only for non-commercial personal use.
You may link to this page, but you are not allowed to present any of BILDRUMs models as downloadable from a cd, dvd or whatever other source including your own or somebody elses web site. 

   Christmas 1999, Art of Sailing
The model shows how Santa brought the art of sailing as a gift to mankind. There are pictures from the mid 19th century making it evident that people in Sweden at that time still remembered the original way of using a tree to make the wind help them. It is said that birches are the best trees for summer sailing. But the Christmas tree was specially developed for winter sailing. When there were many Santas out on the dark sea (the sea inScandinavia is very seldom frozen already at Christmas time) they lit green candles to starboard and red candles to backboard to make traffic a bit safer. They also used to have a white top star in the tree. The latter has now become a common tradition in Sweden although the Christmas trees are more used for decoration than for sailing.  
                 Rightclick the picture and "save as" to download the jpg-file for the model.

 

  Christmas 2000, Art of Flying
The model shows how Santa brought the art of flying as a gift to mankind. It was a long time ago. Santa was sitting by the hearth on a dark and cold winters day. He had just eaten the last snack and threwed the empty paper bag on the fire. But instead of landing in the flames, the heat rising from the burning logs filled the bag and made it fly up in the air.
  This must be investigated, Santa mumbled, fetching paper, pencils, scissors and glue. He constructed bigger and bigger paper bags. He placed  holders for paraffin (kerosene) and pieces of cotton waste in the middle of the opening to heat the air inside the bag. When he lit the cotton, the paper bags went shining up in the dark sky.
  Several days later, Santa was ready for taking off seated in a basket hanging under a great ballooon he had glued together. This was technology at its very best, he thought, technology for fun. Frenchmen were the first to follow Santas idea a little more than two houndred years ago. But flying in hot air balloons has become something like a tradition in Sweden. On beatiful evenings, you can see lots of ballooons hanging in the air over central Stockholm, the capital of Sweden.

You can download the model by rightclicking the picture and "save as".  You can also enlarge the balloon part and use it as a template for own experiments with free flying balloon models. But if you do such experiments, be very careful with fire. It is beautiful when the shining balloon goes to sky in the night. But don´t put your neighbours house on fire!
   

 

 

  Christmas 2001, Art of Driving

The model shows how Santa brought the art of driving as a gift to mankind. It was about the time in the late thirties when my parents fell in love with each other. Cars were expensive things that only the very rich could afford. It would be great, Santa thought, for people to have a vehicle for easy and democratic transport - type "Umbrella on four wheels". I will present my idea to Pierre Boulanger in the Citroen factory, he is the only car manufacturer who will understand. Thought and done. "Vers Quai Javel sur la Seine" Santa said. And off he went with the two-reindeerpower prototype to what was later (in 1948) presented as the 2CV - the worlds most loved car.
  Santa said to Pierre: "This vehicle will divide the world. You will be able to see which people are good and which people are evil. Some people will love this car. They are the good ones with love, humour, ingenuity and social competence, people dreaming of a good society for all.  Other people will hate this car. They are the evil ones, ignorant, egoistic, competitive and arrogant, just making a hell for others in their strive to make life better for themselves.  Íf you are among the lovers, this car will be the best and most personal friend you could have when you can´t feed a horse or a reindeer to help you transport yourself and your gifts."

To download the model, you need Acrobat Reader. Rightclick the picture and "save link as".
Print on thicker paper (120-160 g/sqm).

The model is small, detailed and not one of the easiest to build. Don´t forget to score all folding lines, even Santas nose and eyebrows. There are some cuts to make before assembling: the bearings for the wheel axles and the steering wheel axle, the center hole in the back sides of the wheels (K), the cut under Santa´s nose and the cuts to make his feet possible to bend into right position. 
  If you are not used to rolling paper into narrow tubes (parts C, I, T), you could replace these parts by wooden sticks or suitable round grass straws. 
  Santa´s arms and legs are quite movable so you could seat him as you like. You could also make the model better by making the wheels thicker (add some more rings N) or by cutting out the windows and install "glass". 
  Note: The model is quite accurate. The 1938 prototype really had only one front lamp and no visible outside door handles.
There is a wonderful example of how this model could be motorized on Roger Pattendens web site. Have a look at  http://www.heritage-models.co.uk and click on 'visit Santa'

 

  Christmas 2002, Art of Lightmaking

Most threatening to ships and seamen is not the sea, but the land. What might be thought of as a safe place could anytime just break your ship into pieces. Don´t come to close. Lee-shored you could miss the chance to get out on the open sea again.
  Lights were of course a great help to all seafarers in the night. But to make a well visible light was not so easy, especially not in bad weather when the light was more needed than ever. An open coal fire could show a bright light to the in-coming wind, but hide itself behind its own smoke in the opposite direction.
  It was in the late 18th century that Santa brought the art of burning coal to make a clear light as a gift to mankind. He had several ideas. One of them was given to the Brittish light house engineer Smeaton and an other to the Swedish engineer Anders Polheimer. The idea was to control the air stream through the burning cole to make the flames clear and smokeless.
   Santa probably knew that times were to come when lights could go on and off automatically. So when the engineer wanted to thank him for the gift, Santa answered: "Don´t thank me. Thank all those people who have to watch the lights in the nights; who have to haul coal and bring baskets after baskets up the stairs to keep the light burning. Snow or rain, storm or coldness. In all weathers the light must shine. The people who keep the lights are the real heroes. Keep them in your mind even when you in the future get electricity and automatic devices that you now can´t dream of."
    The first Swedish lighthouse to use the Polheimer system was Kullen in 1792. The last built one was a small provisional light house built in 1849 on the Östergarnsholm outside the eastern coast of the island Gotland in the middle of the Baltic. The Östergarnsholm is in itself a small paradise and a gift to all people who get a chance to visit the little island. The model shows the little Polheimer light house that is still standing on Östergarnsholm between the older and the newer light houses. Let it memorate all those people who lived their lives and gave all their efforts to keep lights burning.

Download model by rightclicking picture and "save as". Print on160g paper
  Score all folding lines, even Santas nose and eyebrows. Don´t forget the cut under Santa´s nose and the cuts to make his feet possible to bend into right position. Most difficult is perhaps to glue platform D to place. Glue the part centered on top of C before the edge is folded and glued to place. (You could eventually copy the circle B and glue it under D to help centering.)
Note: The model is accurate. The real shaft corresponding to model´s part F is though  longer to let the ashes from the fire down to be dug out through the door in the front wall. The wind holes in the shaft were opened or closed according to the weather.
 The model contains a template for a more scale true ladder if you want to build the model as a scale model. The scale will be about 1:40 when printing the pdf on an A4 sheet.
Picture shows the original from 1849 and what is left of the older lighthouse.

 

 

  Christmas 2003, Art of Rail Running





  It was a long time ago in Santa land. I think it was young Marklin who invented the H0-track just to give his friends some fun during eleven long months of underemployment. And fun they had, driving faster and faster and some years almost forgetting the oncoming Christmas. 
    One year Santa thought that this might be a good idea to present also as a Christmas gift to mankind. Perhaps it would make people come closer to each other, have fun together and stop bother about making war. If they just made the track 87 times wider, they could put on really grand carriages and run from village to village, from town to town over whole continents just to see each others eyes and feel better. 
    But Santa also recognized some problems concerning the propulsion even if the rails themselves reduced the need for power, from lots of horsepowers on the old road, to one santapower on the rail. Well, Santa said, people are used to rowing boats. Let me use the rowing technique to drive the carriage and people will sooner or later learn how to use a steam engine for the rowing. I have actually got my eyes on a man named Stevenson who will no doubt settle it. 

 
Download  model by rightclicking picture and "save as". Print on paper 120-160 g/sqm.
  To make it possible to roll the axles, you need to use paper with the grain running parallel to the longer side of the print. (Which is normal when you buy ready cut copy paper.) 
  The model is small, detailed and not one of the easiest to build. Estimated building time is five hours. An interested and experienced builder will probably use more time than modern instant-ready-type people.
 Score all folding lines, even Santas nose and eyebrows. Don´t forget the cut under Santa´s nose and the cuts to make his feet possible to bend into right position. Most difficult is perhaps to roll and glue the axles and shafts and put them together so that the whole thing can move. A round needle file is usefull for grinding up the bearing holes. 
   Axles could be wrapped around narrow bamboo sticks or suitable wire if you want them more rigid. Enlarge model 144% and print in halves on A4 if you want to build bigger.
                        

 

  Christmas 2004, art of gliding

It was in the early 1890-ies that Santa got the idea of presenting to mankind the art of gliding. He knew of a certain Otto Lilienthal in Germany who together with his brother since their youth in Vorpommern had thought a lot about birds ways of using the air. Otto had also in 1889 published a book on the birds flight as a ground for the art of flying. 
  Otto Lilienthal, Santa believed, would be the right person, careful and methodical enough to carry through all those scientific experiments needed to make humans fly with the help of wings. People had tried wings since houndreds and houndreds of years. Now the time had come to give someone insight in the working forms of a wing. And someone who was also willing to tell the rest of the world how to glide through the air. 
   Of the original gliders that Otto Lilienthal used himself, the perhaps only surviving is hanging in the ceiling of the technical museum in Warsaw. But Lilienthal also produced e series of his "Normal Segelapparat von 13 qm Segelfläche" to be sent out to other people interested in spreading the art of gliding. Some of these, the world´s first "massproduced" aeroplanes, are still preserved  in museums. 
  Lilientahl himself was killed in an accident in 1896, but his glider started a new life for mankind.

Download model by rightclicking picture and "save as". Print on paper 120-160 g/sqm.
 Score all folding lines, even Santas nose and eyebrows. Don´t forget the cut under Santa´s nose and the cuts to make his feet possible to bend into right position. 
  If you want the model hanging, pass a thread through the holes in part H before this part is glued to the model. The beams G should be glued right under the coresponding markings on the upper side of the wings. It could be a little tricky to get Santas arms and hands to hold their right positions. I hope you will be lucky and like the model.
   

 

  Christmas 2005, Art of Printing
Santa this year got a Christmas wish from the Brittish paper shipwright David Hathaway who wanted some light to be spread over the the origins of the art of printing.
   Actually the first step on the way was to give man the ability to reflect over his own footsteps in the sand. Or was it woman getting ideas when seeing the footsteps of her man eager to walk in front of her?  Whoever was the real inventor, Santa this year had to ask his wife Santy to help him. And she said:  "We can do the old thing, let someone in Europe invent a technique already being used in China since houndreds of years. The chinese got the paper around the year 100, the printing around the year 600 and the loose types around the year 1000. By that time, the europeans still did not know how to make paper. But if you just give the knowlege to the right person, the europeans will learn very soon."
  "OK", Santa said in the mid 15th century when the europeans at last learnt how to make paper, "let us give to Johann Gutenberg in Mainz your thoughts about how to build a printing press, how to cast matrixes with the help of loose types and how to get a good ink."
  Said, done and within not many years, the Gutenbergs printing process was in use in all civilised european towns.  I wonder if modern times have seen any technique so rapidly spread from invention to common use?  
Download model by rightclicking picture and "save as". Print on paper 120-160 g/sqm.
Score all folding lines, even noses and eyebrows. Don´t forget the cut under the noses. 
Build according to letters and numbers. With a little bit of thinking, some patience, much carefulness and great luck, you could get the printing press to work.
More tricky is perhaps to give Santy a nicely dressed body, but we hope just that will give you an interesting challenge.

 

 

Christmas 2006, Art of Steelmaking
This year, Santa listened to the Prayers of Steel, so well expressed by Carl Sandburg (Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me ....) and dressed up in a forgemans   linen shirt.
  To get strength and flexibility iron must be refined through a process striving to control the contents of carbon and contaminations. This control was traditionally established by charcoal, fire and hammers.    But hammers were too small and men too weak to live up to the demands of steel growing in manly minds. So "Take this hammer" Santa said one day, "and give it to the Gods of water to handle. Then you can let hammers grow to Forges - singing mothers using anvils as cradles for lumps of iron to be formed into bars of steel."  
      It happened that Santas homeland - Sweden - besides iron ore also had rivers to give power and woods to give charcoal for the refining of the iron. People from Germany and the Netherlands settled in the swedish woods to build iron forges from the 16th century and onwards. For almost 200 years, forge iron and steel produced in Sweden totally dominated the world market. I am sad to admit though that all use of that iron and steel has not been in agreement with God and the wishes of Santa when the art of steelmaking was given to mankind.  

  Download the model as a pdf-file by rightclicking the picture to the left and "save as".
Please observe that you are allowed to download files for non-commercial personal use only. You may link to this site, but you are not allowed to present any of BILDRUMs models as downloadable from your own or anybody elses web site or other media.
   

 

Christmas 2007, Art of Ploughing

Santas wife Eve, also called Christmas Eve, this year asked her husband for a new plough to give to mankind. "It sholdn´t be one of those heavy and expesive ploughs that need lots of animals and slaves or peasants in villenage to pull and drive.  It should be a light plow that could be built by any clever person in the countryside with the new cheaper massproduced Brittish steels. A light plow will produce Freedom as the peasants can leave their landlords and clear new lands for cultivating in the woods. More land under the plough will feed more people and more people will lay more land under the plough. You will see that the light plow will soon be made by factories and give food also to all their workers. The light plough will not only give freedom. It will also give industrialisation and wealth to mankind."
 "But how to do when we can´t afford a horse to put before the plough?" Santa asked.
 "Well, I know this is a problem for a man. He would always be most ashamed if he had someone else to steer for him. But you are lucky. I can pull for you so you can keep steering. Women are through the history used to the hardest works. Men might have more muscels but women have more endurance. This little land of ours is not too much for me and after some crops we can afford a horse and then we could cultivate more land and .."
  OK, Santa said, Per Aspera ad Astra, one must perhaps accept that it costs a lot of hard work to reach Freedom. 
 Download the model as a pdf-file by rightclicking the picture to the left and "save as".
Please observe that you are allowed to download files for non-commercial personal use only. You may link to this site, but you are not allowed to present any of BILDRUMs models as downloadable from your own or anybody elses web site or other media.

 

 

    Christmas 2008, Art of Digitising

 

 

Far back in 1794, Santa asked his wife Christmas Eve about ideas for gifts to Mankind. And Eve said: "Mathematics must be fun. Have you ever thougt of all those people around the world who are trying to telegraph messages over long distances with the help of flags, semaphores and all sorts of curious constructions. Why not give that genious scientist, poet, theatre director and industrialist Niclas Edelcrantz in Stockholm the idea that binary mathematics could be combined with the digital insight that a switch that has only two precise places, on or off, has less chances to be misunderstood than any other means giving more opportunities."
 "You mean that your speech should be yes, yes or no, no?", Santa said. 
But it took some time for him to be convinced by Eve that all information could be translated into binary codes consisting of just the numbers 1 and 0.
  Later Santa got a drawing from Eve and one night put it under Edelcrantz´ pillow. Several optical telegraph lines were built up in Sweden after Edelcrantz´directions and were in use for more than half a century. The digital system was fast compared to other optical telegraph systems as it could deliver 1024 different signs and thus give lots of information with little handwork. 40000 words and expressions only needed two signs to be signalled. And up to 16 signs could be sent around 30 kilometers per minute. That is almost twice the speed of sound.
  "But do you think that this system will have a future?" Santa asked. And Eve replied:"More than you can believe. In fifty years, people will telegraph through electric cables and in houndred years, they will learn how to send messages wireless through the air. But in 150 years people know how to build machines that can automatically translate information into binary codes and reverse. And in 200 years you will have, instead of telegraph lines, a wireless worldwide web spreading binary digits at the speed of light. You will be able to send texts, pictures and sounds from any place and pic it up at any other place. Believe me or not."    

 

Download the model as a pdf-file by rightclicking the picture to the left and "save as".
Please observe that you are allowed to download files for non-commercial personal use only. You may link to this site, but you are not allowed to present any of BILDRUMs models as downloadable from your own or anybody elses web site or other media.

     
 

 		 Top board shows when station is manned and which way code should be read.

Showing boards in upper row value 1 (bin 1)

Showing boards in middle row value 2 (bin 10)

Showing boards in bottom row value 4 (bin 100)

(not showing boards value 0)

Sum down values of each individual column and you get a three numbered code (000-777)

215 in the 1794 codebook meant "GOOD", 
and that is what Eve and Santa wish your Christmas to be.

      

 
If you want the historical table of signs for the digital telegraph, click the picture above.
       

 

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