Homer

That looks fantastic, Rostko, great job with the lighting! I'm impressed as well with your discipline in creating and placing decals on all of the tiles. How did you print opaque gray lettering decals for the black tiles?

What amazing work, Rostko. Did you create your own photo-etch frames for the displays? If you get a chance, would you please post and describe the steps you used to superdetail the astronaut figures?

Rosktko, that’s fantastic work, bravo! Thank you so much for posting. The third photo doesn’t appear to load correctly - would you mind reposting that one? Actually, I am so intrigued by your masterpiece, if you have more images of your intermediate steps, I would really enjoy seeing how you did your work. Please feel free to post more in this thread so that we can appreciate how you took the parts to a completely higher level of accuracy, and also how you intend to make the cap removable.

Those parts look great! How thin are the HUD frames and the seat frames? Shapeways limits the minimum width of unsupported wires (i.e. the frames) to 0.8 mm and supported wires to 0.6 mm. https://www.shapeways.com/materials/fine-detail-plastic-3 Re: geometry matching, here’s how I did it: I got lucky, very lucky. http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk I downloaded Orbiter and looked at the game’s assets, which were fortunately stored as separate files and not compressed into one big data file. The flight deck model was actually still a Blender file, i

Hey Rittic, great work on your seats! I had tried to make the seats in my flight deck look more accurate, with the metal frame and the rods supporting the headrest, but they were way too thin for Shapeways to print in fine detail plastic. So my seats, unlike yours, are blocky and obviously not accurate. But, as I found out once I sealed up my build, if you are building the flight deck in launch configuration with astronauts occupying all of the seats, you can't see any seat detail from any of the external windows, including the overhead ones. I

Thank you so much Rittic for introducing yourself and purchasing the upgrade parts. I look forward to following the progress with your build and learning from your approach; please feel free to post to this thread. Thanks as well for the fantastic link to the German build; that’s a really clever approach using the mesh to simulate surface textures, both for the thermal blankets and the tile.

Hello SpacecraftGuy, Thank you for the kind words about the parts; I’m grateful to the community that has been so encouraging and supported the project. With regards to selling the files directly to modelers, I am not quite ready to proceed in this direction, but I will keep it in mind and consider it if this makes the most sense in the future. I hope to purchase my own resin printer in about 2-3 years and will see if the consumer level technology at that point will be sufficient to reproduce the details with these parts so that one can forego Shapeways; the Form 2 tes

Whoops, posted to wrong thread just now. I concur with mb1k; it’s a real pleasure watching others work with these parts in their builds.

Dave (and other modelers), here is an SVG file for the paint masks for the windows and the fore RCS thruster that you can import into Cricut Design Space; good luck negotiating with your wife for Cricut usage time. I already sent you these masks in the envelope with the HUD frames, but since you have access to a digital cutter, you might find having these useful in case you need to make more paint masks. Let us know how your attempt to fit the parts into the Revell goes. window and RCS masks 2.svg

Hello all, great work MedicModeler10! Forgive me for posting this resource that I am sure most of you have already seen, but Steven Jochums did a tremendous amount of work in coming up with his thermal blanket modeling guide that he kindly shared with the shuttle modeling community here: http://www.lakecountyspaceport.com/files/100625718.pdf I don’t know if a laser cutter could create the quilted look on a sheet of material (i.e. the orthogonal matrix of protruding bumps with the linear border outline). HotDog might be able to give us some guidance i

Thank you Pete and Medicmodeler10 for the compliments about my parts; I’m gratified that they are being received so positively by the community. Thank you to all who have purchased the parts or contributed to this thread. Pete, thanks as well for the heads up about the large volume of sanding/filling work that awaits. My build is on pause as I try to figure out how to create the tile overlay for the rest of the model surface; HotDog’s plan has a lot of promise, and I think with a laser cutter and a thin rubber membrane, it might be possible to simulate the tile pattern over the r

SImon, I really like how you put the microLEDs in those aft slots that I tried to shape like the fluorescent under cabinet lights. I'm looking forward to seeing how the light from those alcoves floods the aft area when it is sealed up. JPaunicka, I completely share your the desire to forego the Shapeways middleman and print my own parts with a resin printer. I sent off the tiled roof of my beanie cap model a few years ago for a complimentary test print by Formlabs on a Form2 to see if it could produce the parts at the quality I wanted, and the tile detail wasn't quite at the leve

Thanks Tracy for the vote of confidence. Will try to make the T-0 panels in 1/100 for the Tamiya model. JPaunicka, the parts are for sale now in my shop: https://www.shapeways.com/shops/homer-s-spare-model-parts

Thank you both for the kind compliments. Thanks to the trial and error learning curve of the beanie cap parts, I think these aft parts came together with less mistakes. JPaunicka, I will be happy to put these parts up for sale on my Shapeways storefront. I need to get the depth of the backstop ridge adjusted (it’s part of the T-0 umbilical base piece), and then I will post the parts for sale, probably this weekend. I apologize in advance to modelers interested in buying the parts. They will not be cheap, and that’s not because of my profit margin; it’s really set by

Simon, your lighting effects look great! Much more sophisticated than my effort. I look forward to seeing the topside image so I can better appreciate your approach using the microLEDs instead of the SMD LEDs I used. My Shapeways prints finally arrived. I primed them for better visibility of the surface details. The slightly undulating texture of the quilted-appearing asbestos insulating rings actually comes across in real life, not so much with the light reflections in this photo. I'll try to highlight the simulated rivets here (the little d

Thank you Simon. I sent off the parts to Shapeways, and should receive them sometime in the second half of February. In the meantime, I went back to work trying to finish the underside umbilical doors. From this reference: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/10543663.pdf I tried to recreate some of the door drive mechanism and the uplatch hooks, trying to figure out how the linkage arms would look with the doors in the wide open position. The sizes of these protrusions are tiny, on the order of a millimeter or two. I ran a test pr

I didn't like some of the imprecisions in the last T-0 prints, so I made some modifications and tried again. The bevel that helps to center the drill for the wire holes in these ports is now on the inside of the port itself, which results in a better centered wire. On the prior versions of this piece, the centering bevel was on the other side of the hole facing into the interior of the fuselage, and my drill attempts weren't as vertical as I hoped, so the wire emerged into the port off-center. Furthermore, the base pieces of the T-0 umbilicals weren't seat

Hi Simon, Here is how I post from Flickr to ARC Forums. I select the photo on Flickr I wish to post, then click on the share icon. That brings up this dialogue box, and I copy the URL in the window to the clipboard. You need the URL from the "Embed" tab. The "Share" tab URL won't work. Then, when on ARC forums, I select "insert image from URL" from the "other media" dropdown menu on the bottom right of the text box where you are composing your post. Paste your link into the dialogue box that follows.

Thank you Simon for the compliment and for purchasing the parts. I hope that they make the build more enjoyable for you. I'm sorry about the expense; the Shapeways fees comprise the bulk of the cost of these models. I think I make enough from the parts sales to cover the cost of purchasing my own parts from them. I did a quick search for the OMS pods on Shapeways and didn't come up with any hits. Would you please forward me a link to the OMS pods you found so I can see how another modeler made them? Hotdog, I forgot that you had already made the T-0 umbilicals. Tha

Thank you Pete for the encouragement. I'm sticking with the launch build for now, and I already assembled the ET and SRBs OOB several years ago before I learned how to create replacement parts using 3d printing and design. Consequently, for now I'm not planning on building more accurate parts for those components. However, maybe after I finish the Discovery and display it, I might be tempted to follow Manfred's inspiring work and try to imitate his brilliant ET and SRB corrections at the much less difficult 1/72 scale. Given how expensive Shapeways is turning out to be, this might have to

Hello Simon and Tracy, thank you both for the encouragement. Tracy, I'm awaiting your response to another message in your Arcforums inbox to help me figure out how to get the umbilicals to fit the Tamiya model. Scaling those parts down shouldn't be too hard. Simon, I would be delighted if you would share with us how your build is progressing; please feel free to post to this thread with images of your progress so I can better understand how others are using these part on their models. Thank you as well for purchasing my parts. I have tried to modify my SSME mounting

I have tried to create parts to simulate the ports on the underside of the shuttle that connect to the external tank LH2 and LO2 umbilicals. I used the images in this document as my main reference: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/10543663.pdf Also, when I used the excellent reference documents that Habu2 linked to above, scaling the diagrams to 1/72 results in a door dimension edge length of approximately 19 mm, but that turns out to be too large for the width of the space on the Monogram model; with the doors in the open position their inner edges would ove

Awesome, thank you so much Habu2, this is fantastically helpful.

Hello all, So after some sanding and filling, I think I have the cargo bay doors adequately positioned. As luck would have it, it's not the border between the beanie cap and the bay doors that has a step off, but actually the aft edge of the bay doors and the start of the OMS pods that doesn't fit correctly. The slight step off here I tried to address with some shims. This will all be underneath some thermal quilts, so I think I can get away with this level of crude approximation of the interface. My heart stopped when I lit it up and had a hu

Okay, I finally received the Li-ion batter, the AA-sized battery holder, and pushbutton switches for the project. While a AA-sized battery seems to fit easily in the wheel well, I didn't calculate the extra volume of the battery holder. To keep the height of the holder within the size constraints of the space, I would need to mount it sideways, partially in the main fuselage space. Furthermore, the battery holder had these little retention wings that would make it difficult to pop the battery in and out from this angle, so I trimmed