How to scan fragile old blueprints?

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I regret the extinction of many species of airplane. I have always liked the lines of IJN and IJA aircraft. I hate seeing pictures of classic planes piled up to be scrapped. More the pity of blueprints being destroyed or lost. It's ridiculously expensive to think of building a warbird from scratch but it would've been nice to have the prints. Maybe an engineering project to construct a static display of an airframe would've been cool.
 
I read rumors that Bob Diemert got original D3A Val blueprints from one of the Aichi engineers in the 1960s for his project but I can't confirm that or if Planes of Fame got the blueprints when they got his Val
 
Back when Russia was making "additional production" Yak-3s, I-16s,I-153s & Po-2s there was an article about an island, previously Japanese, which the USSR took post war that had an airfield with D3As and one B5N. The Russian aviation people were in the process, allegedly, of taking this B5N airframe for building replicas.
 
That would be nice, but I don't trust a) the news b) the workmanship of the Russians

We'll see what happens either way.
 
I would have thought they would have made huts out of them.
 
I didn't know the UK had one.
 
As the originator of this thread, I thought I should probably give my eventual solution to the original problem I was having. We took numerous photos of sections of the large blueprints, but no matter how we tried to compensate for the distortion caused by folds, we couldn't get an acceptable product. So we bit the bullet and took the originals to a gallery that had a high-resolution oversize flatbed scanner, with vacuum table to flatten the paper without damaging it in any way. They did the job and the results were magnificent. We passed the costs for the specific ones we ended up using in our XP-67 book to the publisher, who kindly reimbursed us for those. It all worked out well for us. Even though the originals were several feet (or more) long, you can zoom in on the final scans to the point where you can clearly see the individual fibers in the paper itself. Can't get much better than that!
 
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