I found the 3-view blueprints of the H-101 Salto at the-blueprints.com. I looked for this particular glider because I've actually flown one, and it's my favorite of all the aircraft that I've been able to fly.
This is a Sketchup export of the finished model, above the blueprint that I built it from.
From Sketchup, I rendered it in Kerkythea, then finished it Xara Xtreme 4 (with landscape from Google Earth).
My first render. 
My first Gallery post.
I decided to model a foot as a training exercise for SubSmooth. It turned into a seemingly endless series of "tweak the proxy ... SubSmooth ... tweak the proxy ... SubSmooth ..." (you get the idea). I learned a whole lot about what SubSmooth will do with different shapes, and I got a fairly decent result, but I finally had to force myself to quit fussing with it.
So here's how the exercise came out. I may try a hand, next...
Wow, that's quite impressive! 
I'll certainly buy a copy... 
@caddict said:
Yes very nice solution Teezer, And very thorough. Also nice tut. The rolling process you used is accurate but I can see tedious. I guess you know about the two methods of box selection: from the left and from the right. That could speed things up. You may get a job at MIT
I'm assuming that you meant I could have rolled it from both sides toward the center. Yes, that would probably make it easier. I was so glad to finally get a good result that I didn't even think about improving the process -- who would want to do this on purpose? 
And I'm not looking for a job at all. I've (almost) retired from 45 years of computer programming, and I'm looking forward to just playing with computer graphics and building stuff...
I was afraid you'd want to see how this sausage was made, so I saved some of the steps along the way. And I figured out the "scenes" thing and put together as a tut in the more-or-less traditional manner.
Doing it again would just be tedious. The fun part was figuring out how to get it done. I love to solve problems like this...
Ok, my obsession with carbon nanotubes is officially over. We had already created Armchair and Zigzag nanotubes in the earlier efforts, and all that remained to be done was to create a model of a Chiral nanotube. I finally managed it last night. 
Here is a skp with all three models:
Nice tut Simon! No, I don't mind at all.
And apologies to caddict for hijacking the thread. I just got engrossed in trying to find a simple solution, since the object is made of a very basic set of components that repeat in a simple pattern. My "simple minimum" comment meant that the small section that I isolated in the first model was all the construction that was needed -- the rest was copy and paste (in fact, what was shown was too much if copy, paste, rotate was used, and too little for just copy paste -- duh).
I had a trig reference around somewhere, but it's been fifty years. 
I'll take your word on the math.
Off to look up an "armchair nanotube"...
Playing with this problem some more, I did some arithmetic and figured out how to make a tube of hexagons of a specific size from two circles (actually four, by cloning the first two).
I don't know how to set up scenes yet, so I drew the steps along the red axis. Here's the text that would go with the skp:
To make a nanotube with hexagons of ~12" radius:
Draw a circle of 46" radius.
Drag/copy the circle 10 3/8".
Rotate the copy 7.5 degrees.
Group the two circles, and drag/copy the group 20 3/4".
Ungroup everything, and break the curves.
Hand stitch the hexagon pattern.
Delete the excess lines.
Elongate to taste.
Note: For a circle of 24 sides, the length of a side is the radius divided by 3.8333. For a given side, multiply by 3.8333 to get the radius.
Hi All! I got dragged out of lurkerdom by the nanotube thread, so I thought I might as well introduce myself here. I'm a (retired) COBOL programmer by trade, and I dabble in computer graphics and design because I like to build things. And I like to build things from plans. And I like to create the plans myself.
I first saw SketchUp work on the talkgraphics forum, where Ross Macintosh would show off his SketchUp houses, dressed up with Xara X. I was using Xara for my design work at that time, and I was very disappointed when I found that SketchUp was out of my price range for hobby software. When Google came along, all that changed, and I adopted SketchUp for design work. I still use Xara for photo tweaking and website stuff, though.
Anyway, I started hanging around the old Sketchup forum and reading all the tuts. I followed the work of Joe Wood as much as I could -- he does stuff that I like to do. I'm glad to see him here. And Durant Hapke is very entertaining! 
Currently, I'm following GreenToaster and his 5-minute car experiments, and I'm intrigued by the "organic" modeling concepts being tried out by others. I'm working on a model of a fiberglass sailplane that's very organic (all curves), and I'll post that when I'm happy with it.
Oops, dinner calls...
Terry
Ok, you got me out of lurking status with this problem. I produced a result with the hexagon orientation rotated 30 degrees, which yielded a simple minimum structure that can be built with two circles that have their segments offset by half the segment length.
You'll see what I mean by that when you look at the skp. I used a 36-segment circle, and went through a lot of trial and error before I got it just right.
My wife said, "You're making a roll of chicken wire?"