johnlove_mk_II

Thanks! as205 - The umbilical/access area is integrated into the whole thing as one part. It's a huge chunk of resin. S-IC forward skirt interior Completed a test print of the interior ring. There are still a few things to work out, but it’s getting to where I want. I need to tweak the antialiasing and print angle to combat the stair-stepping. Now, I will be the first to admit that I had to do a little bit of guess work as to how this whole structure looks. I couldn’t find many pictures of the area that weren’t obscured by the giant handling fixture. It’s pro

Been a bit busy as of late. S-IC The main structure consists of three printed rings: aft skirt, intertank and forward skirt. Those will be combined with 5.5” diameter Plastruct ABS tubing to form the main structure. The diameter of the skirt rings is larger than the build plate on my printer, so it required that I split them in half for them to fit. This isn’t a huge problem as there are plenty of fairings and system tunnels to hide seams under. The first prints came out pretty well, there were a few setup flaws, but the results were promising. I tried to minim

Very nice work. The second set of legs look great.

Hi Randy, I found picking up Rhino to be a kinda hit and miss affair. I have a pretty a-typical workflow approach as I tend to do most of my drafting/drawing in Adobe Illustrator and then import bits and shapes as .dwg files into Rhino to model them out. Having used Illustrator for over 30 years I find that to be the quickest, most efficient, way to go. Those skills are pretty baked in and I've found that trying to draft out anything in Rhino, or any other drafting program, to be completely confounding. BTW, I was looking over your SA-1 and SA-5 builds, they turned o

Saturn 1 (SA-1) Really wanted to start printing some stuff and since there’s a ton of work still to do on the boat-tail I decided to start working on the pointy bits. I made it slightly more complicated than I was initially intending but it was actually a load of fun. I discovered that all the block 1 Saturns utilized a Jupiter (PGM-19) nose cone and aft unit. I couldn’t find any super clear photos on a Saturn so I just used images I found of the PGM-19 and kinda winged it. Added all the obvious hatches and openings and I’ll admit they’re all a little more pronounced than they should b

Decided to start a separate post for the 1/72 Saturn I and IB I’ll be working on in conjunction with my 1/72 Saturn V. Didn’t want everything to get too convoluted and such. Saturn IB Building out the Saturn IB was going to be a no-brainer for me seeing that most all of the work on the top half is already being done with the Saturn V build. Like I posted earlier in my Saturn V thread I had an open weekend, so just decided to go for it and see if I could get a proper start on the first stage. Completed most of the aft structure, but there are a few details to add. Spent a f

Been a little while hasn't it. Real world projects kinda got in the way, but I'm slowly working back to this lunacy. Since both the Saturn V and Saturn IB share hardware, my intention has always been to build a Saturn IB along side. I got a little hung up on designing and printing the larger S-II and S-IC skirts for the smaller printer – I was starting to get bogged down. I decided to keep the mojo flowing and just see how far along I could get last weekend with the S-IB and I got most all of the aft section modeled. I'm pretty happy with the fins and hold-downs but H-1s all st

Four attempts later and I now have a usable forward skirt for the S-IVB. Just had to dry-fit some parts together to get an idea of what she was going to look like. Makes the 20+ hours of failed prints seem a little more worth it. Now to finish up the thrust structure.

Finished up the forward and aft skirts for the S-IVBs. Started printing last week, it took three iterations to finally get a near flawless print of the aft skirt. I learned a lot, so going forward I hope things will proceed a little more smoothly. Printing the forward skirt as I type this ... should have a semi-complete S-IVB in about six and a half hours.

Exactly the same diameter. It's 331" ... or actually about 333" if you count the spray-on polyiso foam.

I've actually given this a bit of thought myself and have even gone as far as to do a preliminary drawing or two. The core stage is roughly 4.6" in diameter at 1/72nd scale, so a piece 4" PVC might work in place of that, although the OD is slightly smaller at 4.5". You could get a piece of 4.75" Plastruct tubing and split and reduce the diameter down to 4.6". The SRBs are a section longer too, so you'd need to extend them a bit. Maybe two shuttle stack kits ... or just scratch them with your 3D parts and some 2" diameter tube. Totally doable, and since there's actual hardware n

My bottle had some like filmy globs. Thinking back it honestly just looked as if maybe the top had filmed over because it had been exposed. I probably could have just filtered out all the solids, but there was only about a third of a bottle remaining so I just decided to not risk it and started with a fresh one. I'm just using the standard Anycubic grey 405nm stuff. A 1kg is like $24, a heck of a deal. For cleaning I've invested in one of the cleaning and curing stations. It really saves a ton of time and the parts come out flawless. I found the one I have for less t

Thanks Jazz! I'm really pleased with how the Elegoo Saturn is performing – everything, so far, has printed beautifully. Oh, and I added no drains ... thought about it, but found that it wasn't necessary because of the small-ish size. Getting ready for the next round of printing so I started concentrating on the S-IVB thrust structure. Got most of the main items – now for all the fiddly bits.

The final prints were straight up and down. Like this: On my first attempt I did have them canted 45° and they came out ok, but there were way too many supports to clean up in critical places.

Thanks everybody! The second (and third) prints, with the new supports, completed without issue. I now have a baker's dozen of perfect J-2s ready to roll. Pete - Those are straight from the printer with no sanding or anything. The Elegoo Saturns have a 4K resolution so there's very little stair-stepping. You really have to take a magnifying glass to see it at all, which is awesome.

The first proof print of the J-2s is complete. Was hoping to do the first print this weekend but I discovered that my resin had gone funky so I had to order a new bottle. I'd say I'm about 95% there. There where no failures but I think I may have been a little too heavy-handed with the supports. (Some of the details where obliterated during clean-up.) Going to try again with an updated support scheme and I might dial back the exposure time ever so slightly. Pretty chuffed at how these guys turned out.

Finished up the J-2, now to try to get it to print. Setting up for that today and hopefully should have some freshly minted J-2s sometime tomorrow. Decided to get all the propulsion out of the way first so I'm digging into the F-1s currently. Going to try to model them with the TPS blankets, which will likely require that I learn some Blender. So the plan is to design the foundation in Rhino first and then add the wrinkled texture and such via Blender. That's the plan anyway. Fingers crossed.

Thanks guys! Information on the J-2 is pretty scarce, so most of my references are photos. When I visited KSC a few years back I spent a few gigabytes on the J-2 they have there in the garden. I got a total walk-around and way more detail shots than I likely would have ever needed. I did get my overall shape from one of the few three-view drawings I've found, then I just started adding things in as best I could with a ton of dead-reckoning using the photos. Been a slow go of it lately, and I'm kinda tired of the J-2, so I'm going to work on the thrust structure for a

Here's the J-2 so far. Think I'm getting there, but there's a lot of little things to add.

Received my set of Rick's decals from Cult TV Man yesterday. No surprises, they're absolutely perfect – like always.

Hi Habu - I know, it looks a little weird right? I decided to model it as close to "launch-ready" as possible so I'm including the rarely seen impingement curtain that bridges that gap between the edge of the thrust structure and bottom of the aft skirt. (I think it's there to protect the aft skirt equipment boxes from the S-II retros.) Not sure what it's made of exactly, because I've found very little info on it, but it does have what looks to be zipper closures for accessing the equipment and such. I still need to add the surface details and make it look wrinkled somehow.

The J-2 is coming along well. Not absolutely perfect, but I'm pretty satisfied so far. I keep reminding myself that this is 1/72 scale and a tube not having the absolute perfect curvature isn't going to be the end of the world, especially if it's to be partially obscured by some other little detail.

Spent some time this weekend with Rhino and fell back into the groove pretty well – had a few cobwebs to dust out of the ol' brain. Started by tackling the S-IVB thrust structure. I had modeled this before in 1/144, and I could have tried to scale that up, but I decided to just start from scratch. After a little bit of drawing I also decided to do my own version of the J-2s. These little buggers are far more complex than you can imagine. Still a ways to go, but here's where I stand right now. The J-2. There's so much more to add. The beginnings of my S

Got most of my drawings consolidated and sorted, thankfully it all seems to be there. It looks like I have most of of the main structure modeled so it might be just adding a ton of detail bits all over the place. I may need to optimize some of the parts because they were designed with production at Shapeways in mind. The second-hand Elegoo Saturn arrived today. It's in really nice shape and way bigger than I was expecting. Just ordered some fresh resin and FEP film to get ready for the first print attempts. I'm sure there's a lot to learn with printing super-large parts, so I sus

It's been a while, eh? I'm happy to say that it looks like this project is back on. I just found a lightly used Elegoo Saturn 4K printer for a price that I couldn't pass up. Like Pete mentions above it has a similar build area of the Photon Mono (192x120mm) which means I can likely split larger sections up. It should arrive next week, so now is the time to reacquainted with Rhino 3D and also track down all the drawing files I have spread across three hard drives. Wish me luck.