hendie

Marvelous stuff, Bill.

Someone, somewhere, sometime, mentioned seats. I can't remember who it was (sorry) but the comment was around the utterly horrible rendition of the seats supplied by italeri. Well, you know what happened next don't you? Yup, I looked at them again. That made me do this... For this design, I've eliminated the horrible kit pi s used to locate the seats, and gone for a center pin instead. This means the user will have to drill a new 1.5mm hole on the centerline between the two existing holes in the bulkhead. Simple job. It's still not great is it? The problem is that there is limited room for improvement over the kit offering due to the overall cockpit design. Italeri have made the center console too wide - and that reduces the width available for the seats. If the seats could be even a millimeter wider they would look a whole lot better, however, that means I would need to design new center console for the rear bulkhead, and since that mate's up to the one on the floor, we'd need a new console there too. Those in themselves aren't difficult, but the end user would need to remove all the existing detail and try to not damage the "quilting" on the bulkhead. No! I'm not going to design a new bulkhead with quilting . That's a bridge or rather, bulkhead too far. Any thoughts from the hive on that? As designed, these are a drop in replacement for the kit parts. I can easily widen them, but that means a lot more fitting for anyone trying to fit them

Greetings all, and a Happy New Year to you all. Lets hope this new one is better than the last one - it decided to sucker punch me in December and I'm still reeling from the effects. However I did manage to make some advances in the 3D world regarding the Wessex transmission area. Following the previous test prints, a number of tweaks and minor changes were made and the parts are now finished. Apologies in advance for the distinctly poor quality photos. I even gave these a quick shot of primer to try and help the camera, but to no avail. It seems the camera just doesn't like that blue background. However, we now have a complete set of transmission housing parts in 1:48 scale. WSX48 Set C Transmission Area From the left we have Reservoir (stbd) Main rotor head Main rotor gearbox Oil filter (stbd) MRGB torque link Winch hatch stop Reservoir (fwd bulkhead) Cooling fan Cooling fan pulley U Frame Rotor brake, and at front of the photo we have the Crossbeam I decided to model the swash plate as part of the main rotor head. This allowed me to add the pitch change rods, which means the end user doesn't need to mess around trying to cut and glue tiny lengths of rod to impossibly small gluing surfaces. It also means the entire head rotates as one. All the user has to add is a 1.5mm diameter rod to join the parts, and it also means the head can easily be disassembled should anyone want to transport the model anytime. The kit rotor blades need to be trimmed (easy job) and drilled, then a 1mm diameter brass rod or similar can be used to assemble the kit blades to the rotor head. Here's a better overall shot with the blue background removed. Add a fan belt and some plumbing in there and it should look extremely busy. The end user will also need to add the two support stays that extend from the rear of the gearbox, back past the cooling fan. Two pieces of 1.5mm rod should suffice for that job. (brass rod can be seen just poking out the bottom of the gearbox in this pic - a little plug or a blanking card will prevent that) The position of the inverted U Frame is a bit of a wildcard. Something wacky is going on with the Italeri transmission area, and I think they have the region immediately behind the mesh and forward of the beetleback too short. I've shown the frame here slightly behind the front face of the fan. In reality the frame should be further forward - around that pencil mark on the floor, but when I do that, the arrangement doesn't match up with photos of the 1:1. Tests have also been made with a 1:72 scale rotor head to see how it handles the rotor blades and so far, it appears there are no issues. I'm not sure there would be much demand for a 1:72 Set C as Italeri do not include a transmission deck floor, but I have had several enquiries regarding supplying just the rotor head and MRGB for 1:72 so that may be an option. All feedback on this and any other matter gratefully received. I want to do a quick double check before saying these are fit for public consumption, but all things going well, the 1:48 Set C should be ready to order by the end of the week.

Nice job on the mesh Ian. This should be fun to tag along to

thanks Johnny. Old Robbiy's tarnsport has taken a back seat for the moment due to the recent flooding event, trying to catch up on Wessex bits orders, and my first experiment with the clear dome didn't go as planned so I need to have a rethink on that front. Happy New Year to you

It's not the complexity Sebastien, it's the geometry and wall thickness. My guess is that bulge coincides with the internal section where it transitions from a solid to the hollowed out section at the front. If you look closely you'll see that the outer diameter at the hollowed out section is actually smaller than the section lower. What is happening is: as the print closes in on the FEP film, resin oozes out of the gap. In the solid section, it can only go outwards. When it reaches the hollowed out section, it can go both outwards AND inwards towards the center. Depending upon your wait time, resin can continue to ooze out even when curing. My recommendation would be to hollow out the entire part, keeping a nominal and uniform wall thickness is perhaps 1.2 to 1.5mm, and if necessary, print another part to fit inside if you want to prevent anyone seeing an empty space

I haven't, but I shall definitely avoid it now

you just bl**dy well did!!!

Lovely butchery Johnny. I wish you hadn't said "prance," though. As if that photo wasn't bad enough, I now have a mind worm wriggling through me head posting visions of a prancing Johnny.

'Tis the festive season so what's a poor boy to do but sit in front of a computer all day and draw bits of Wessex, eh? I'm sure I could have found more pleasurable activities but I feel I am getting close with this now and the digital mojo was rising above the simmer. It seemed in the best interests of all that I shut myself away in a room for a few hours and stare at a screen and some reference photos. Tilt now added. Gearbox tilt that is, forward by 3 degrees. I had to redraw the support frame from scratch as the two front sts are now shorter to accommodate the forward angle. I also widened the track of the supports as they reach the outer edge of the trans deck floor on the 1:1 and Italeri had them (no surprise) too narrow. There's a certain degree of fudging going on here as the Italeri kit is so far off in places, so I've bought another artists licence and played a bit loose with the truth, but no-one other than a Wessex xpert will ever know the difference. And you lot, of course. A front'ish view Followed by a back'ish view from the other side. A few things have been updated since these screenshots were taken. The torque link has been taken out and is now it's own separate part (to allow the PE mesh to fit over the head). The cooling fan has been updated to add pipework to the starboard side, and I've also made the cooling fan pulley a separate part. The latter was to allow me to put a hole in the fan front, which in turn allowed me to print the cooling fan vertically and allow the resin captured inside to drain out. My first test print did not go according to plan, mainly due to my own ineptitude. I failed to notice I had not placed the parts correctly on the print bed and the oil filter housing ended up being printed as part of the main gearbox assembly. D'oh! That aside, it did allow me to test the newly added tilt and see if the gearbox was going to work in the confines of the kit. I had made up this fixture earlier with a hole lining up with Italeri's offering which allowed me to test the latest design. I'm going to call that a win. In case anyone is wondering, this is what the MRGB looks like after a quick wash and ready to trim. This will give you an idea of why I put my prices up slightly for the New Year. It is quite time consuming to remove all those supports while trying not to damage any parts of the gearbox itself. Multiply this by the number of orders and it quickly eats up many, many hours of effort The end effect however will be worth it. Trying to photograph the grey resin is an impossible task, but when painted up and a few bits of plumbing added, I think this will look great in anyone's build. I know the position of the cooling fan and the hoop frame is wrong in this shot, but aside from that, I think I'm about done with these parts. I still have the rotor head to finish off as well as create a new swash plate, but I am hoping to get these finished and ready to order by mid to late January, at least for the 1:48 scale parts. (and still working on some 1/32 parts). I'll need to run some test prints to see if this can successfully be scaled down to 1:72. Hopes are high but I think I might need to do some tweaking to make it all work. We shall see. Since I have a Set A (Engine Bay), and a Set B (Fuselage), I thought I would keep with tradition and make this Set C Transmission Deck. Set C Transmission Deck will (at this time) consist of: Main rotor gearbox MRGB torque link Rotor brake Cooling fan Cooling fan pulley Hoop frame Winch hatch door stop (stbd side) Reservoir (stbd side) Filter housing (stbd side) Cockpit bulkhead reservoir (port side) Floor cross beam and perhaps another bit or two depending upon how much time I have to spare over the coming weeks. I'll need to take a look at pricing but I think it will be in the same range as the other sets, with a discount if multiple sets are ordered/combined. I think this will really add some bling to any build where someone is brave enough to open up the transmission area. Just think of the hours of fun you can have adding all the plumbing I shall try and get some parts from the latest test run primed and photographed as it's difficult to see all the detailed in bare naked grey resin.

I'm not sure what to write Johnny. I generally avoid commenting where personal issues are concerned - though not from a lack of empathy, more from a "anything I write always seems trite and almost rehearsed and others always seem to say it better" view. Therefore, I'll limit myself to a simple - I hope you get a good strong leash around the black dog Mr J. That photo... Sheesh Johnny. Give us some warning before you do that again will you? I'd only been awake for about half an hour and was still midway through my first coffee. Now I need a second cup. and good to see your plastic fettling skills are still up to scratch. Merry Xmas to you and yours

thanks Bill - those are useful. I also found a couple of good shots in the 4+ book, so have everything I need now.

The results are in for the first test print folks. It's promising so far but there's still a lot of work to be done to get this to fit the Italeri kit, which as we all know is a bit of a mess. For the test piece I opted to print the entire MRGB as a one piece. I'm still not sure if I should break it up as the component parts are so small they would be incredibly fragile and a nightmare to assemble. I'm going to leave it to the end user to add as much plumbing as they wish, or not. Now, this is where it starts to get complicated. I have designed the MRGB in a vertical stance whereas, in reality it has a three degree tilt forward. Italeri have it closer to 5 degrees or more. I now have to add a tilt and have the rotor shaft hole in exactly the same location as Italeri's or the PE mesh won't fit properly. I'll have to create a jig to reference that hole location. I also have to separate out the swash plate torque link as italeri haven't accounted for that and the mesh will not fit over the hendiepart MRGB as it currently stands. They also have the trans deck floor too low, and just to add the icing to the cake, their cabin roof is too narrow for the fuselage by a good 1 to 2 millimeters. The main question here is: Do I design this area to fit directly on to the kit floor? Or should I use that as a sub floor and create a new floor above it? There are many rabbit holes in this kit and I don't want to disappear down too many of them. That bulkhead in the kit is non-existent on the 1:1 and is in reality, just a frame. The real bulkhead sits further back on the transmission deck. I think I'll go with using the kit floor. It's a bit of a cop out, but if I want this to fit both the 1:48 and the 1:72 kits, things would get extremely messy and I only have so much time I can devote to this. Sometimes a compromise has to be made and I think this is one of those times.

All sorted! I found the information I need in the 4+ book.

that's about as much as I remember Pete. That and the fact that was the side you had to crawl under to get at that bloody magnetic plug under the gearbox.

A little pre-Xmas update to whet the appetites. First up is that old nugget, the 1/32 beetleback. Unfortunately this was not a simple case of scaling the beetleback I had created for the italeri version, and this had to be redrawn from scratch. The forward facing surface on italeris kits are an (almost) perfect semi-circle. Not so on the Fly kit. Surprised? No. Since I had to use lofted surfaces for the overall shape, and those lofts were very early on in the design tree, it meant that when I went back and changed the profile it blew the model up. There were so many areas to fix that it was easier to start from scratch. This little effort took somewhere around 5 or 6 hours to complete. The biggest issue with the Fly offering is that instead of a simple semi-circle, Fly decided for some obscure reason to splay the bottom end out quite significantly. Look at the outer lines on the highlighted blue section here. That "design" caused issues further down the line when it came to adding the louvers as the spray messed up the spacing in several areas. It's not perfect but it was the best I could manage and still make it fit the Fly kit. I can't believe that Fly kit is still kicking my butt all these years after finishing it. Now for something a bit more interesting - the Trans deck area. Port side shown here. There are still a few small items to add (and a floor, maybe) but for the most part, the port side is now complete. The starboard side is proving a lot more challenging, though not from a geometry/ modeling standpoint. It's the fact that the transdeck is a rarely photographed area, and when it does see a camera, it's the port side that gets all the glory. Photos of the starboard side are proving impossible to find. There are a few (very few) photos out there but the resolution is so low that they only hint at the detail. It's been 4 decades since I worked on these and I really can't remember much at all about that area. I know there's a reservoir and a filter housing, but I haven't been able to find clear details of how they are mounted. I guess I'm going to have to start making stuff up for this region. A view from above. Not much else to say really. Looks quite busy though. I think the bracing legs need spread out a bit more but I'll need to see how much room there is inside the kit first. Tweaking that spacing is straightforward enough. I managed to catch up with most of the orders this week and even get ahead in some areas. That meant I could afford some time to run a test print this weekend. It should be ready tomorrow so I'll be able to tell how far off I am in this design, and it will give me the chance to start making the tweaks necessary to make it fit italeri's kits. Hopefully I won't be too far off. If the gods are willing, I might even get to post some shots of the test prints before Santa sweeps the chimney.

very nice update Giorgio. You've done a great job with that seat and the belts. I'm not a fan of molded in belts and prefer to make my own but those look well defined. Nice job.

Mike, that would be great if you still have them - thanks

I've been searching the internet for some time now trying to locate some decent photos of the transmission deck - the area that houses the main rotor gearbox and a few other goodies. All to no avail, unfortunately. I'm aware of the wessex walkaround on YouTube, but the quality is too poor to glean any useful information. I'm also aware of the Helicopter Museum restorations, and while those are among the best photos I've found, their resolution is too small to be useful. Does anyone have good quality shots of the transmission deck area that can share?

so you didn't go for the scribe-the-mesh-into-the-clear-bubble method then?

I agree completely. Bills innards are indeed a wonder to behold.

Still very much a work in progress and now nearing a slow down phase. I really need to print out a test version before going any further, but I've been busy catching up on orders over the last two weeks and didn't want to slow down production... car trouble and life threw a bagful of spanners at me last week, and I missed a couple of days production. Without having a test print in my hands it's very difficult to tell if I have things in the right ballpark, scale wise. Here's the rotor brake assembly, or at least some semblance of it. Followed by a view of it alongside the gearbox Front'ish view And you can see I've started adding some more detail around the gearbox itself. The majority of this detail is in the sub-millimeter realm so until that print is in my mitts I'm not sure how this is all going to turn out, but based on past results, my hopes are high. For those that have placed orders over the last few weeks: the 1/48 prints are almost finished and I'll need a few days to clean up and package things. The 1/72 prints will follow very shortly after that, followed by the 1/32 prints (which are going to take a bit longer as there is still some design work to be done on those.) All things going well, I should be able to start sending packages out around the end of next week.

Assistance? Therapy would be more beneficial

All these numbers are making my head hurt. Nice work on the symmetry diet.

Courageous man, Steve. I always find it nerve wracking to hack into already completed scratchings... I'm always convinced I'll just make the darned thing worse. Nice recovery though.