Moon Bug part 3

I have finished detailing the top surface and built a communications dish.

Just for a change I truncated the dish from the full circle. It is made as per usual from a small LED push light dome. The support arms are from a broken transformers toy. The signal sensor on the dish is also a transformers part.

The green sensor dome is from a baby's toy.

The black shape with the slot in the top is from the cover of the laser head from inside a CD Walkman.

The other black shape I think was out of a ink jet printer.

I also made an opening hatch which was pretty pointless as there is no hole underneath. I'll probably end up gluing it shut. The hatch dome was a cut down dial from an old washing machine.

The rest is the usual assortment of kit parts and styrene sheet panels.

I also added some half round ABS extrusions around the purple acrylic pot halves in the valleys. This gives the subtle impression of an underlying inflated shape which I quite like.

Thanks for looking.

More soon...

The gestation of a project.

The following is a an example of how a project of mine starts from a random idea to a possible physical reality. I do a lot of these preliminary processes on project ideas and there are many factors that determine whether the idea becomes an actual project and I start posting about them.

I find I have to really be surprised by how a project is coming together for me to push through to completion. It has to start looking as good or preferably better than what I imagined when I started for me to ignore the many distractions along the way. As soon as a project doesn't quite measure up to the image I held in my mind's eye at the very start, my devotion starts to slip away. If I then find I don't really like what I have done I lose interest and the project sits abandoned.
In the case with this body it still has something I like about it and I realised that I had not followed my own thumbnail closely enough. Somewhere along the way I had lost what it was I liked about it in the first place. The main problem was the front and those side windows which originallywent all the way down. After I made the front window I filled in the lower part because it didn't fit with the narrower aspect of the front window. This is due to the fact I never roughed out the front in a sketch. When I look at the thumbnail now I can see that I meant the front window to be as expansive as the side windows. In fact I imagined it going up over the roof stopping inline with the angled back of the side window. Narrowing  the front window had ruined the proportions.  I also constructed a much larger bevel along the top edge than suggested by the thumbnail. It no longer had the character that appealed to me to start with.

Sometimes with the passage of time a project can be re-evaluated and a spark of an idea to rescue it from abandonment surfaces.


I have been looking at possibilities over a long period for the rejected body for the creeper 6X6 project which is just lying around.
The picture below shows it on that Creeper 6x6 chassis and I just didn't like the way it sat, for me the proportions were all wrong, the wheels were too small and the chassis too long.

I have tried it on a few different  four wheeled chassis with various sized wheels and it just never seems to look right.
The the other day I got the idea that maybe it would sit better on an alternative to tyres.
A quick photoshop session then ensued to rough out the concept and see if it had legs, or more specifically tracks.

Now to my eye that's much more like it, I think it sits well on those tracks which are from a M113 APC. I also changed the nose slightly  to hint at a larger area of glass to the front which is a big improvement. It was time to move to an experimental phase as there was a big technical question to be answered.

Can I find some tracks that would do the job. I considered various Heng Long Tank chassis and tracks at 1/16 scale but they are too small to look right. Can I get a larger scale set of tracks? I found the very thing on Ebay, metal 1/8th scale tracks with drive sprockets to fit... but they cost way more than I can afford.
The next obvious question is can I make my own tracks that will be strong and work?
It was time to try an experiment. The first step was look at various tank track links and determine the simplest solution to engineer with my meager resources. Most of them are very complicated castings but I remembered the Tamiya Leopard metal tracks and how they easily go together from simple parts and decided to upscale that concept.
Next step was to rough something out in CAD which I did and decided it was too big so I drew up a smaller version you can see below.

The material I chose was grey PVC sheet. It is a material I am familiar with and more importantly I had some in 6mm which actually measured out to 5.6mm thick which is better for me. Sliced up some strips on the circular saw and chopped them off on a mini docking saw. Drilled holes and inserted brass brazing rod pins.

The pins are 2.4mm in diameter so the track pads were drilled 2.5mm for clearance. The cleats on the end of the pins which tie them together were drilled 2.2mm so the pins are a press fit and hopefully wont come off, a drop of thin superglue should do the trick if they look like loosening up.

 

The test showed that it would be possible to make them provided that the drilling was precisely spaced and square. To achieve this a jig would be required to make the job easily repeatable and accurate. It would be a tedious job as I estimate I would need around 124 links to make two tracks. There are 5 parts and two pins per link making 868 parts with 1240 holes needing to be drilled.
I was also thinking of adding a rubberpad to each of the track pads, superglue would do the trick here as it works very well on both rubber and PVC.

While I think it wouldn't be too difficult to make the idlers and the road wheels and even the suspension arms, there is the question of making the drive sprockets which would be another story in itself.

Will this idea proceed? There is a chance it will as I am enthused by the concept but I have a few other projects requiring attention at the moment so we will see.

Thanks for looking.
More soon...

Resilient cruiser part 6

Sprayed some primer on the undersurface.
It was 33 degrees celsius outside in the shade this afternoon so it took seconds to dry.

It tells me I need to do a bit more to the engines.
The rest of the underside is fine as it is, considering it will hardly be seen when the model is ever on display.

Thanks for looking.
More soon...

Oldest Unfinished Spaceship Model part1

 Along with the recent work on the Resilient Cruiser,  I have started to rebuild the front of my oldest unfinished spaceship project, started in around 1995.

For the background story on this model see this post from 2013 

Unfinished Old Spaceship model Part 2

  If you have read the original post you will know that I was never happy with the front end of this spaceship and so it was left abandoned for a very long time. In fact I always found the front end of a spaceship to be the most difficult area to complete to my satisfaction.

A few years ago a charity shop visit resulted in finding a baby's toy cement mixer with an interesting shaped mixing drum. This was found to have a similar radius to the plastic lampshade that comprises the mid section of this Old Unfinished Spaceship.

In a more recent charity shop visit I came across a strange toy that had an interesting form. What you did with the toy was a total mystery but the shape suggested a sort of half a UFO. I put it down to look at some other stuff and then left the store forgetting this mysterious toy completely. The shape however remained in my mind and I slowly realised it would make a perfect front for this project. The next weekend I returned to the charity shop and it was nowhere to be found. So I have been searching for many weeks to try and find something that would fit the bill. Then I noticed a cheap (only $3.00) plastic ( styrene or acrylic) salad bowl in the supermarket. It is supposed to be used once and discarded which seems a bit wasteful. But for my purposes I figured I might be able to cut off the bottom and then cut that part in half to make a shallow half saucer shape. 

That half saucer shape is then mated to a 6mm foamed pvc structure, skinned with 1mm styrene sheet glued on with thick superglue after first roughing the styrene surface with coarse sandpaper. The saucer is press fitted so it can be removed to eventually install a simple cockpit interior that will be lit with leds. The scale looks like it will be 1/72 so I have dragged out some 1/72 German soldier figures from the Hasegawa Leopold kit.

The cement mixer drum was cut in half and glued to a 2mm styrene structure with pvc pipe halves added to the sides. This mates with the old mostly completed back section with a piece of PVC pipe and a box section.

The old back end was modified internally so that it now has a block of PVC tapped M12 for a support bolt from the top and bottom. 12 volt DC power connectors were added and wired up for the future cockpit lighting. Getting access to the engines for lighting is problematic so I may not bother. When I made the original model way back in 1995 I didn't consider adding lighting or a support rod.

Underside Hole for support rod and power connector.

Top side hole for support rod and power connector.

 

Below is a view of the mostly completed and grey primered back end circa 1995, now mated to the new front structure of 2019,  a period of 24 years separates them. Observant readers will notice that the top surface detail of the old back end section is used for the background image of the rcscifi blog header.

 

The engines are two ribbed acrylic cups with acrylic tap handles glued on the end. Forward of the engines the main hull is a plastic blender jug cut in half and separated by a styrene box structure. After the blender is a ribbed lampshade also cut in half and added to the box.

You used to be able to get  lots of useful styrene, abs and acrylic plastic shapes but not any longer, they are increasingly harder to find. Most toys and domestic products these days use a safer form of plastic (without the more toxic plasticisers of old), poly-ethylene, poly-propylene and BPA free poly-carbonate which are all in my opinion useless to the serious found object modeller as they cannot be reliably glued, puttied, painted or sanded.

More soon...

Resilient cruiser part 2

Its only been 3 years since part 1 (September 2016) but I am back on the Resilient cruiser.

See this blog entry from 2013 Unfinished Old Spaceship model Part 1 for the background story to this project.

As it happens the Resilient criuser part one page is the second most popular page on rcscifi.
Why that is, is a mystery to me but the photos feature on a lot of Pinterest pages which result in clicks coming from Pinterest going to the page.

I have started to detail the upper surface.

I was given a box of old broken transformer toys which took me a long time to disassemble into their constituents keeping the styrene and ABS parts (as well as the screws) and junking the rest. You will see a few of those bits show up on this project.

I also started on the Com tower using one of the small battery powered push light domes for the dish.
I have some other smaller dishes to add to this tower in keeping with the Ep 1 Radiant VII influence.

More soon...

Part3 is here.

Moebius-1 part 4

I started paneling and detailing the flat top side of the moebius-1 project.
It's still a work in progress.

 
The long grey finned panel at the rear above where the engines sit is a paper guide from an inkjet printer. The two red panels are from the transformers SCVNGR toy.

The rest is an assortment of kit parts, evergreen panels and strips, black 2mm, 1mm and 0.5mm styrene and 3mm and 6mm foamed pvc sheet.

There is still more paneling and piping to be done as well as a fine detail pass.

Thanks for looking.
More soon...

Moebius-1 part 3

Thanks to a reader comment I have finalised  the design and construction of the forward pontoons.
The reader suggested that the original Battlestar Galactica flat top pontoons were made from Bolton Paul defiant fuselages and that lead me to look at other suitable aircraft kit donors. I was originally thinking submarine hulls but couldn't find anything cheap enough or the right length to width ratio. Finally I found some 1/144 scale Kawanishi " Emily" flying boat kits at the right price and importantly the right size for my needs on Hobby link Japan.

The fuselage sides are cemented to a central spine made from two layers of 2mm styrene sandwiching a core of two layers of 1.5mm styrene. The two layers of 1.5mm styrene leave a 3mm wide pocket for the support struts made from heat bent 3mm PVC sheet.

A section of fuselage was cut away for some recessed nurney kit part detail.

 Here they are with the first coat of grey primer. There is still a bit of spot puttying required here and there to be done, along with some detail on the struts but for the most part they are done.

And finally here they are in position on the spaceship hull.

Thanks for looking, more soon...

Explorer part 5

The previous post on this project was in October 2014 and this model has basically not progressed since then.

I am joining some other sci-fi modellers and we are exhibiting our models at the Perth Supanova 2018 event starting on the evening of Friday 22nd June. I decided to take some holidays (two weeks) to give me time to try and finish some models for the display. Its remarkable what a deadline will do for motivation, the first model completed was the Kong head Toybash 6x6 project and then I decided to tackle the Explorer that had been sitting around for years nearly complete and actually finish it.

The first thing to tackle was re-wiring the lighting. I discovered that the big 10mm LEDs I had installed already had a resistor inline to run at 12 volts. This meant I needed to change the wiring power supply to 12volts and not the 7.2 volts I had already installed. I wondered why they seemed so dim. The Leds needed to be wired up in parallel instead of the the series format they were in, and I added some extra white leds for a cockpit control console in the cockpit, 8 in total. The white leds I used had a forward voltage drop of 3 volts so 4 in series makes 12 volts. I then wired the two sets of 4 in parallel. I tested the led torches which I had wired up two in series, by gradually increasing the voltage up to 12 volts and they seem to be OK at that voltage. I suspect there is some electronics inside that regulate the power they receive.

Here's some pics of the console lit up. This will throw light up into the cabin interior and onto the faces of the occupants.

Before I built the console I started on a cabin interior and seats. Two 1/12 scale Star trek figures,  John Cho and Simon Pegg to be precise, (though the Simon Pegg face does not really resemble him at all) will occupy the chairs as planned 4 years ago. The seats are made from Foamed PVC sheet, 10mm and 3mm thickness. I hacked away at the figures thighs to get them to sit properly and drilled a hole through their torsos so they can be securely screwed to the chairs under their silicon jumpers.

The rear of the cabin was made to fit the space left between the hull and the RC chassis. It was kit part detailed and piped in the usual fashion., shown below after spraying with primer.

And here it is after the usual application of poo juice and white dry brushed acrylic and with figures in seats added.

The next step was the roof of the cabin which attaches with a couple of kitchen cupboard magnetic catches. It was detailed and then primered and weathered the same way, only this time I took some photos of the steps in my weathering process.

First up is the grey automotive primer.

Next is the addition of Poo juice ( mix of Tamiya flat black heavily diluted with methylated spirits or ethanol), here slathered on with a soft wide flat brush and still wet.

After drying, (it doesn't take long).

Then wiped off with a rag wet with methylated spirits on all the surfaces and raised detail . You have to keep moving to a clean bit of rag as it gets dirtier. You want to leave the dark in the grooves and around the edges of all the parts.

Then apply cheap white acrylic paint and dry brush it on. I use a stiff oil painting brush and a bit of MDF. I add a small dollop of paint and then get a tiny amount on the brush and scrub it back and forward on the MDF to remove most of it.

 Then apply to the model scrubbing across the raised detail and all the edges. Add more paint to the brush and gradually build it up to a pleasing effect.

Thats it, job done. It works really well on most surfaces, but the paint underneath cannot have as its solvent alcohol, such as water based acrylic paints like Tamiya colour.

The rest of the model has been painted and weathered. I still have to fit the console to the cabin after the windows have been glued in and then it should be finished after more than 5 years.
Pictures of the completed model will come in the next post.. coming soon.

If you happen to be going to Perth Supanova on the weekend drop by and check out all the other cool sci-fi models that will be on display. I will try and get some photos and post them up after the show.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.