Homer

I put in some more design time this week to try to make some improved OMS pods with the tile detail. Here is what I have so far: If anyone could help me, please, I could use some assistance finding more images that show the details on the medial edge here adjacent to the tail (circled in green): This is the best one I could fine online of this area: And also blueprints/diagrams/images that show the tiling detail on the aft surfaces here, including on the pedestal that the AJ10 nozzle is mounte

Thanks Pete and Manfred. I am waiting for the arrival of the Li ion battery and the battery holder, so I won't be able to make much more progress with the build until those arrive in a few weeks. I did place two LEDs inside the beanie cap (not on the scaffolding), one underneath each starboard and port panels in the aft portion of the compartment. I ran out of warm white so the port side has a cool white LED, as seen here in the photo. I also raised the port rear LED that illuminates the CCTV monitors by a little bit. Previously the light from this LED wouldn't ill

Much to my relief, the canopy glue seems to have held. The tiled cap is seated close enough to the beanie cap case that I think the step in the seam will be hidden underneath the thermal blanket layer. I cracked the tiled cap from all of my fiddling to get it to seat correctly that I will have to disguise. Now, the test is to see if the backlit displays and control panels will be visible despite the interior light. First, I needed to make a scaffolding to mount the warm white SMD LEDs outside the cap. Rather than mount them to t

Thanks Manfred. I think it's safe to say that your work motivates a lot of us during our builds, and hopefully not just in our moments of despair. Okay, so I am being more careful this second time with the window glass to cut my panes to conform closer to the actual visible portion and not extend to the edges of the polygonal flat surfaces, so as not to create any unnecessary volume that will mess with the proper seating of the tiled cap. I am only applying four dots of canopy glue to the corners to secure the glass, since the panes are going to be sandwic

Thank you Aussie and K2 Petes for the encouragement, and I'm moved to hear of DutyCat's death. He was quite a kind correspondent via e-mail when I started this project and encouraged me to press on with my attempt to make a more ambitious beanie cap. Okay, so brief detour into following Primed Model Works' excellent recommendations for straightening the cargo bay and creating a little slot and tongue to align and reinforce the bay doors. So, as usual for my mediocre modeling skills, I got ahead of myself and primed and light-blocked the hull since I

Next installment, cap assembly. Here are the pieces. Please note the layout of the numbers for the overhead bags here: I slid the ceiling portion above into place over the flight deck, and ran a bead of cyano around the edge of the aft wall. Then I slid the assembly into its slot on the beanie cap base. I clamped the ceiling and applied cyano around the join in the front. On the underside, I inserted the interdeck hatch plugs into both sides and glued them in place.

Hello all, Thank you to those modelers who have purchased these parts. I hope that they are useful to your builds. After a brief(?) hiatus, I resumed work on the flight deck. I was unhappy with the monochrome orange color that resulted from painting the ACES outfits with acrylic, so after much trial and error, I followed some guidance from more experienced modelers and used oil washes. This way, the pigment collected like a wash in the crevices and folds, and added depth, or at least, didn't obliterate any of the surface details. After priming with white,

My apologies for the long delay in updates. I was working on another build and am currently in the process of moving so I had to pack up the model shop. I anticipate that I won’t have a model shop again until October when my household effects get delivered to my new location. In the meantime, Hotdog brought to my attention that cutting the fuselage kit halves to accommodate the beanie cap and RCS insert can be quite unforgiving to end up with the proper alignment with the payload bay doors, so I wanted to post the measurements that I came up with here. These are based on Dutycat

Hi Tim, Thanks for the kind compliment about my shuttle parts. The flight deck in my model is patterned to simulate the glass cockpit upgrade to Atlantis that occurred in 1998: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/flyout/glass_cockpit.html Thus, STS-27 took place 10 years before this upgrade occurred. I suspect that you would be able to modify my decal sheet to make the screens up front look more like the older cockpit layout without too much effort, but if you want to backlight the displays, that might look a little funky since the cutout

Hi Tim, I am skeptical that the Cricut Maker would reliably cut metal any thicker than aluminum foil. In addition to blunting the blade quickly, I think the bigger limiting factor will be due to the adhesion mechanism they use to stick material to the cutting mats. The mats are coated with a sticky Post-It note type glue. If you try to cut a material that is above a certain level of rigidity, I am guessing that the piece will detach from the mat under the shearing force imposed by the blade. I end up using Illustrator mostly for the vector graphics design. I have A

Hi Tim, Yes, I have tried cutting styrene sheet a little, and it worked quite well. I cut some 0.010 inch thickness styrene sheet with the fine point blade that comes with the device and it worked just fine - the results were clean and certainly better than what I could do by hand. I bought the more robust knife blade but haven’t used it yet. The product information states that you can cut thin balsa wood with the knife blade, so I believe that it should work as well with thicker styrene sheet. You can customize the pressure that the machine exerts for a given

Thank you K2Pete for the encouragement, and Tracy for the kind offer. Tracy, let me see how the 1/72 version of the beanie cap/flight deck works with other modelers and if the response is positive and the demand for the 1/100 Tamiya version of the parts are high, I'll consider trying to scale it down. It will require a lot of work to redo this in 1/100 scale with the geometries adjusted to match the Tamiya orbiter. One of the modelers kindly let me know that those handles for the pilot and commander are not throttles, but controls for the speed brakes. I am quite appreciative fo

Phew! The size works correctly. I had to shave out a little more space in the cutout where the RCS insert goes so it seated more precisely There is a slight raised lip on the insert to accommodate Hotdog's planned tile set that you can see in the above photo. The RCS insert fudges the geometry a little to fit in the space on Monogram kit, but it corresponds more or less to the area outlined in red below: Hotdog, I'm hoping that your tile set will be able to include that thin strip fore of the RCS insert so that the gray nose looks proportionate

Hi Hotdog, Thanks for the compliment. I think the split of the nose is because I have the beanie cap base poorly seated (you can see that it isn't quite aligned with the adjoining wall from the kit part) so it's forcing the two shuttle body halves apart. I'm on the road this week away from my model bench, but when I get back this weekend I'll try to confirm that the nose split isn't from the RCS insert tongue being too wide. I made the fore tongue narrower specifically to avoid forcing the nose to split, but I wasn't careful when I put the pieces together to compose that photo a

My Shapeways order arrived last week, and I had a little time to try painting the RCS inserts. I primed and then light blocked the inside face, then I sprayed it with metallizer. Then I sprayed the white areas unmasked. For Christmas I bought a Cricut Maker. This turned out to be a huge time saver for cutting paint masks. Here is one of the two RCS inserts in place. It now fits well in the space. I ran out of time tonight, but next I'll try making the rain covers. Here is a link t

Thanks Hotdog - that image will be helpful as well. I found some more, not quite as close up as yours: It looks like the little rectangular patches over the ovaloid covers are pouches that trap air and help to shear off the covers after launch. The small lateral fore thruster doesn't have a cover on it at launch. I added that hollow portion back to my RCS launch config insert to reflect those changes. The rest of the thruster ports are modeled solid so the decals that simulate the covers will adhere. Here is my firs

Thank you Wombat and Ralf. I have now discovered today that my mediocre modeling and painting skills are matched by my equally mediocre decaling skills. Continuing my glacial construction pace, I painted ghost gray on various components on the aft wall and the main engine throttles. For the flight deck in launch configuration, I super glued in place the translation hand controller between the aft windows. Please note that for the on orbit version, Dr. Stone's hands are already printed gripping this and the rotational hand controller, and hopefully these

Test print of the RCS insert arrived. The details look crisp. Unfortunately, the fore end is about 1 mm too wide, so I'll have to shrink it a little. I tried to create a little contrast between the thrusters and the surrounding tile, so I tried putting down a base of gunmetal metallizer in the thruster ports. I then sprayed scale black over the rest of the part with the thrusters masked. Then I sprayed a lighter coat of scale black to blend the thrusters with the exterior surface, and then painte

Rob, I will see how Shapeways prices the RCS insert when it’s included as part of the flight deck or tiled cap (all of which are printed in fine detail plastic), but I don’t think that it would be any more economical. The reason why I’m not simply attaching the RCS insert to the beanie cap base is because the beanie cap base is printed in strong flexible plastic and is a lot cheaper than if I printed it in fine detail plastic. The RCS insert needs to be printed in FDP. Southwest Forests, thanks for the compliiment on the astronaut figures. This iteration should look b

Thanks Manfred - those are really helpful references. That took some serious research to compile that information. There are some good places to stick a laptop on the 1/72 flight deck so maybe I'll add some decals for those. Gary, please be aware that not only will you want to shave down the inner lip of your beanie cap base if you buy the RCS thruster insert, but you might actually shave off the first millimeter of the piece (leaving the shortened insertion tongue in place). I did it last night with my Dremel and it was easy, and fits fine with 1 mm removed of length.

Hi Vidar, I don't have any plans at present to try to make this for the Tamiya shuttle, but if the interest is high, I might be willing to try to convert it. It will be a lot of work. If you don't mind, let's see how the current scale parts turn out and if the demand is high enough for the 1/100, I would certainly consider it.

Thanks Hotdog and Robhp. I just submitted the order to Shapeways for the RCS insert so I'll post info on how it comes out. It looks like they don't expect to get me the new parts until after Xmas. It looks like the Updraft model seats are far more realistic than mine. I'd be interested to see how they did that, because the seats I designed are at the limit of Shapeways' guidelines for thinness of parts with the fine detailed plastic. The headrests that Updraft features actually mount on thin cylindrical supports; at 1:72 scale there's no way that the fine detail plastic could support the

I didn't have a lot of model shop time over the holiday, unfortunately, but I did get some Blender time on the laptop while traveling. I've been working on creating a more accurate part for the fore RCS thrusters. I'm not sure how much of these details will be visible in the print, like this striped semicylindrical indentations around the thrusters. I had to fudge the angles of the piece to match the RCS cutout from the Monogram model; you can see here that the fore and aft slope of the part aren't aligned with the blueprints.

Thanks Habu, that’s not a bad idea for the wiring. If I ever get far enough along with this project, I’ll see if it makes sense to run the wiring through the ET/SRB assembly. Gary, I just eyeballed the colors and then looked in my paint drawer to find some approximate matches. I used the Gigapan image to determine some of the flight deck colors. http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/102753 Most of the flight deck is white, and I used the decals to add most of the colors. I used some grays for the devices mounted on the aft wall, like the CCTV and the rotational

Thanks to you both. Pete, please let me know if that link works for you once you sign up for a dropbox account. I just clicked on it and it worked for me. Gary, I am planning on lighting the shuttle, but I've never made my own lighting system before, so I have no idea if I will succeed in my attempt. I plan on using a bunch of warm surface mount LEDs powered by what I'm guessing will be a 9V battery hidden behind the main engine mounting. I might have to 3d model something other than the kit part which has the integrated elevon or whatever it's called to include a ba