Barbie Jet - Freighter Spaceship part 2

The cockpit interior and occupant figures were painted and weathered. The lighting wired up and the whole bridge module was glued into position on the hull with no further interior access possible.

Moving on to the rear of the craft I blocked in the tail section and added all the engine bells. The engine lighting was wired in and tested. Before gluing the side pods in position I sprayed primer grey onto the bits that will be extremely difficult to reach later, mainly the area around the cutaways for the large engine bells and the engine bells themselves.

I am using MR11 LED mini downlight bulbs at 12 volts. All six of them together are drawing around 1 amp. These have a bi-pin ceramic connector which just fits inside a small length of pvc conduit that has been glued into holes at the back of each of the acrylic cups I'm using as engine bells.

The two larger engine bells on the side pods have a plastic tap handle glued inside them. The tap handles have a ribbed interior and a slightly curved hexagonal shape that adds a bit of interesting detail.

I also made up a cargo door that would hinge down to form a loading ramp. In this case it is not operable but doubles as an access hatch to get to the engine lighting connectors. I added a switch so the engine lights can be turned off leaving the cockpit interior lights still on.

Once the dimensions could be ascertained I designed up a door detail on LibreCad, my new free ( open source) 2D CAD program of choice. Making sure to put a dot at the centre of each radius I printed it out fullsize and stuck that template onto a piece of 2mm styrene (HIPS) sheet. Then each dot was drilled out with a step drill to 8mm diameter as the curves were designed with a 4mm radius. Then the lines between each hole were cut and the resulting part after a bit of sanding was stuck to a piece of Evergreen grooved sheet. I made up a chunky looking hinge element that acts as a handle to remove the panel which has a magnetic cupboard catch at the top holding it in place. Looks like I will need one at the bottom as well.

I did test that I could get my hand in to where the lighting connectors were to go before I finalised the size of the access hole and therefore the dimensions of the cargo door. 

I put a 1/72 scale man in the following photo which shows the relative size of the spacecraft.

Returning to the front end I chopped the nose cap in half and fixed it in place with some internal tabs of 2mm styrene with thick superglue and epoxy putty to fill the large gaps. More polyester putty will be needed to fully fair in the shape.

Thanks for looking.

More soon.