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1/72 Saturn V - a reboot of sorts


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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. 

 

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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 still need some tweaking and fine tuning.

 

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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 minimize the amount of supports needed by using a sacrificial strip around the bottom of each half-ring, attaching the part directly to the build plate, and printing the ring half perpendicularly.  This worked out really well.  My post printing processing went really quickly and all that was needed was to carefully saw off the support and sand it square.  So after multiple printing sessions, spanning a month or so, I have all the S-IC ring parts printed.

 

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S-IC aft skirt details.  I think I have some spacing inconsistency with some of the bolts around tie-down that differs from the real thing – I might correct and reprint these. The umbilical connectors will be separate parts.

 

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The intertank corrugations.  This was one of the details I really wanted to try to represent as accurately as I could. 

 

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The brackets that connect to the tank “Y” flanges were especially entertaining to model.

 

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S-IC forward skirt.  I’m currently working on an inner ring that nestle down in this one that will feature the interior details and act as a support for the LOX bulkhead dome.

 

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Cut the two Plustruct ABS tubes that will represent the Fuel and LOX tanks to length and dry stacked the whole stage.

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Those look amazing.  That is going to be one good looking S-1C!  Was the access panel than fits over the corrugations on the intertank a separate part or was it modeled as part of the whole?

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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 probably not 100% accurate, but it looks the part.  If you’re curious I used John Duncan’s awesome pictures of the S-IC-15 stage and some images I took back in 2006 of the S-IC-14 at the JSC, as a reference.

 

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Pretty surprised the little diagonal supports came out as well as they did.

 

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I’ve also started modeling the LOX bulkhead.

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