Thursday, August 21, 2025

Erick's Back Baby! with free papercraft Homeworld papercrafts & Pepakura design tutorial


More than 10 years ago I showed you the papercrafts on Erick's Models but to be honest I think I didn't specifically told you he had a design tutorial too! 😨

I had already been looking into making and sharing my own papercrafts to give back to people like me that enjoyed the hobby. In 2002 I started (and still love to do sometimes) makig papercrafts by scanning pencil and paper templates, but I always wanted to make my favorite heroes from my favorite video games out of paper too but It seemed to difficult... 😕

I think for me it was Erick's Models just before 2005 that took the time to explain step by step the tools needed to extract videogame models (from Homeworld in this case) and then how to clean them up with Metasequoia and unfold them in Pepakura Designer to make papercraft models on the computer!

Erick (a.k.a. fructose1) has been busy with other things and unfortunately the site slowly went away, but in 2025 Erick (and the site) is Back, Baby(read fructose1's forum post on the Paper Modelers forum! 😀)

Download + build your own free original and Homeworld models & learn how to design papercrafts yourself (by Erick's Models):

Wednesday, August 20, 2025

Ways to look for old papercrafts with "dead links" on my weblog here?

Let's face it, the papercrafts that I found and shared with you all over the years since 2008 may have been deleted long tim ago by now... (of course the papercrafts that I made and shared myself since 2001 are all still available on my main website at www.ninjatoes.com 😊)

For the ones that you find in my blogposts here or that I shared in one of the link lists here though, you can still try to look whether they still exist? You can do that in various ways:

1) Use the dedicated search box
Maybe the creator just rearranged their website and just moved the webpages around? Most websites have a dedicated search box where you can look for the papercraft if you know the name (try what you find here on my blogposts here) or look for a more general search term (who knows what else you might find? 😀).


2) Do a site: search using Google
If the website doesn't have a dedicated search box, you can still do a site: search in Google. Go back to the URL of the website (including the http:// or https:// part), delete anything but the domain name (usually it ends with .com or something so that you know you're looking in the entire site) and then the search term that you're looking for, a space and then site: (including the colon) just in front of the domain name. You can write out the "code" for a site: search like so:


Then when you press enter, Google will search for your term in the entire site (depending whether you started on the main domain name, or a parent page if you wanted to 😀)


3 Use the Wayback Machine (https://web.archive.org/)
Sometimes the whole website will (understandably) be gone though after some years... you can go to the Web Archive and see whether it has saved (crawled) the old site with the papercrafts you're looking for?

  1. Type the URL or the papercraft download webpage (that's why I never delete old links in blogposts) in the Wayback Machine.
  2. Then press "enter" and hopefully it will find a number of times when it "crawled" the site, indicated by a blue circle (green circles are redirects).
  3. Choose a date close to the blogpost (or a newer date to see which newer papercrafts it had since I posted it and before the site went away?)
  4. Then choose one of the times to see what it used to look like at that time and hopefully you can still download the papercrafts!

Sometimes you get lucky and you can still download the old papercraft, but sometimes the Internet Archive didn't actually save the actual papercraft file downloads (that's usually the case with filesharing sites like RapidShare (remember that? 😉), Megaupload or one of the many others) and then I can't really help you either...


Sometimes like on bigger sites that saved the downloads on its own webspace though, and the Internet Archive has crawled it at some point (there's luckily a lot of papercraft sites like that though), so you can still find it if you find the right date!


(4 Look around on other sites)
If the methods1-3 didn't help you, you may still find it if somebody else saved it before you on some other website (usually fun, popular papercrafts 👍)! Needless to say, if you find a papercraft that you like (even if you won't build it right away) just save it! 😀

Tuesday, August 19, 2025

free papercraft ace_Akira_ Tsutenkaku tower


Some time ago I told you that you can download official Osaka Tsutenkaku tower papercraft from the official site, but if you look at ace_Akira_'s Twitter account you can download an unoffical but quite funny papercraft I think! 😀

Download + build your own free papercraft Tsutenkaku tower (by ace_Akira_):

Monday, August 18, 2025

JAMSTEC Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology papercrafts


On the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) park site you can find some papercraft deep-sea creatures 🦀of course but also some research vessels 🚢 and even a super computer!

Download + build your own free research vessels, deep sea creatures and more papercrafts (by JAMSTEC):

(dowload instructions: on the left side of the JAMSTEC Park site, reload the site if you don't see the papercrafts; deep-sea drilling vessel Chikyu and Shinkai 6500 three-person manned submersible also here)

Sunday, August 17, 2025

free Akita Prefectural Police papercrafts


On the Akita Prefectural Police site you can download some free papercraft police cars, but also a police helicopter, a police bike and even the famous free follow-me eyes police dog and two simple police mascots! 👮🚔

Download + build your own free papercraft police cars and more (by Akita Prefectural Police):

Saturday, August 16, 2025

free Yamaha papercrafts


In 2019, just before the  Covid-19 pandemic,  Yamaha took a lot of great papercrafts from their site... During the pandemic though, they put some of the papercrafts back on the site together with other handicrafts and exercises so that people could occupy themselves while they had to follow the official rules to Stay At Home and protect others!

The pandemic is over now though, and it looks like Yamaha is keeping some of the seasonal 🎅, animal 🐒 and realistic motorbikes 🏍 on their site! 😀

Download + build your own free Yamaha papercrafts (by Yamaha Papercrafts):

Thursday, August 14, 2025

free papercraft Kyono MK Oil gas station girl Graphic toy



I'll say it again: EVERYTHING IN JAPAN NEEDS A CUTE LITTLE MASCOT! Even gas stations. 😉

This cute little Emu gas station girl for the Kyono MK Oil station in the Yamasina Ward in Kyoto is so popular that they're actually running out of cute Graphic papercraft toys! Luckily, they decided to share it online too so anybody can print and build it themselves! 😀

Graphic Download + build your own free papercraft Graphic toy (by Twitter Kyono MK Oil):