hendie

It's the deck that the main rotor gearbox sits on - it contains the MRGB, cooling fan and a bunch of other hydraulics and greeblies. I never said it was going to be accurate

Outstanding result. I don't think you could get any closer to perfection

that is looking bloody marvelous Bill. I struggled with the piping in 1/48 so how you manage this in 1/72 is beyond me. Marvelous.

A small update to finish off November and to let you know that work is still continuing (despite life's best efforts) to keep this project moving along. Bear in mind that this is still very early in development and there's a long way to go yet. First up, the MRGB and a few small greeblies underway, with many more to come. Followed by the swash plate pushmepullyou Lastly, the units combined I'm still trying to figure out the best way print this - as a full assembly, or as discreet components, and also which of the plumbing lines to include, if that is even possible. Stay tuned, but dont hold your breath. As I mentioned above - still a long way to on this. It's definitely going to roll into next year given the limited time I have available to work on it. My ideal plan would be to produce a full transmission deck, but we'll need to wait and see how far I get on that.

Dib dib!

It looks as though there wasn't enough support under that section of the model. What resin are you using? What was your layer height? And what did you figure out went wrong with the first print?

It's good to catch up on the work of a non-lazy modeler . Nice throttling, Giorgio, and there can never be too many photos.

Post #1 of this thread updated with latest info to save people having to hunt through the thread in order to find pricing details. FYI. I will be increasing prices slightly on 1st January 2024, so get your orders in before the end of the year. Thanks to all who have ordered so far - I hope the sets have met with your expectations. Hendie

Thanks Pete - are you getting lonely down here in Altair IV? Seems like the ID has got everyone. Talking of the ID, I sent the wife out on a mission yesterday. She likes going to craft shops - I needed something from a craft shop and I get bored going to craft shops, especially when they're about 45 minutes drive away and I only want something very specific. Something like a clear acrylic ball of 75mm diameter. There appear to be gazillions or 'em on Amazon and other shopping sites, but I don't want to buy packs of 10 and I really don't want to pay the extortionate shipping charges. Her mission proved more difficult than anticipated. Here in the wondrous US, obtaining something of 75mm diameter is more than a challenge, it's downright impossible. She did return with some bounty though, and it may just work... or not. First up were these plastic baubles. I knew straight away the diameter was too large, but they were cheap and should do for proof of concept, and for figuring out the jig I'm going to need to ensure I get a straight cut. The other bauble in the red case at the back is a much better candidate. It's slightly smaller, and it is actually molded plastic as opposed to cheaply vacuformed effort like the one in front, above. The small child shall be released back into the wilds before I attempt to cut this one, Other than that, the diameter seems about right here, n'est pas? But first, a quick trial run. For this I enlisted the help of the tin man lookalike. and after the surgery was complete, it was very obvious that a) This vacuformed plastic was way too thin, and b) The bauble wasn't even spherical, hence the rather misshapen disc thingy I ended up with. However, this was just proof of concept and wasn't worth getting too upset about. A couple of dabs of superglue later and we have a rather deformed but effective wind deflector Seen here to slightly better effect. btw, the jeep got a good covering of gloss coat on it yesterday and it hasn't made the slightest bit of difference to that HS Silver finish. At least the gloss should protect the paint from getting rubbed off during handling, which is the wont of Alclads finest. To be honest, the HS Silver finish has turned out much better than I thought it would and I think it's a close match to the original jeep. Now that is done, I think I have figured out a decent fixture to allow me to get a straight cut around the sphere and also define the center point for the mounting boss. If time permits, I shall throw one into the printer this week and test that as soon as I have time available. (More Wessi bits are being printed this week to satisfy the Wessi fanatics out there so the printer is going to be very busy again).

Wonderful stuff Bill. You're doing a fabulous job on this.

Wow! That is looking seriously good, René

He'd be too lazy to load it

See? The REBELLION has begun.

Proof of concept huh? Damn teasing is what I calls it. There you go showing us all those internal gizzits and wotnots and then say you're too lazy to do the work? There'll be a rebellion I tell ya Well, since you've now got two kits... To paraphrase Mr. C Eastwood - Do one for them (panels open to the max) and one for you (boring old closed up plain old boring looking boring Hurricane) Rebellion, I tells ya oh, by the way - just wonderful digital (and analog) modeling again. To think we've watched you grow up from 2D CADding little vortex generators to training little UV pixels to create your three dimensional wizardry is wondrous to behold.

SO.... the 6 is on the 4 and the 3's are on the 9, or is it the 6 since there are two 3's ? and there's only one 6, or is the 4 on the 9, or the.... sounds like an Abbot & Costello routine you've got going on here Ian. Wonderful painting job though - I really like how the numbers have come out. They give the models a real period style hand painted look

hi Terry, yup, wing, fuselage, any non uniform contigous shape This is the fuselage of my Wapitit build - I created planes on each of the section locations then created the appropriate cross section on each The start of the lofting process Fully lofted, and with a few additional features added The wings were created using the same processes. If you are interested I go a bit more into the process in the Wapiti thread itself.

Where's @CedB when you need him? That Nimbus is coming along very nicely, Bill. I still find it hard to believe you're doing this in 1/72 - the Fujimi kit was hard enough at 1/48, or 1/50, or whatever it was.

Thanks Pete - nice find. After much procrastination I decided to go with the Alclad RAF High Speed Silver. That was not before I took a closer look at the parts and decided to sand everything back again to eliminate some surface imperfections and scratches. Painting in between all those flanges was not the easiest job in the world and it is by no means perfect, but I think I managed to do at least a half decent job which passes a cursory inspection. Likewise, painting the doors/gates slatted whatever they're called was another painful job. The top gates (in front of view) have suffered from a little warping again as can be seen on the lower flange/slat/edge. Nothing too serious though and that can easily be sorted out during the final assembly. The jeep body came out rather nice and after all that indecision, I'm actually quite pleased with the HS Silver finish. It's a big beast innit? I'll wait a day or two before going over it all with a gloss coat... or should that be a satin coat? Gloss methinks. Once the paint was dry enough to handle, I fitted the bracing rods in the upper cabin, and fitted the doors. That all called for a quick dry fit to see how things were looking. You can see in this shot that all the door slats are sitting more or less where they should be with respect to the cabin housing - except that bottom slat. It's warped upwards slightly so isn't resting on the little boss I added in. A small spacer block will fix that easily. Robby got to try out his new mode of transport Pleased? Yes he is, and so am I. The final pose will either be this (with the doors fixed in position) Or like this, with the upper doors open so you can see a bit more of Robby. I think my preference is for that last shot, but time will tell. Now I need to get searching to find some suitable materials for the seats and the wind deflectors. I think I have the wind deflectors sorted but I'll need to order them and wait until I have them in my hands before I'll know for sure.

hi René, yes there was not a lot I could do to get around Italeri's molding. I assume you do mean the kit when you talk about inconsistent thickness? It looks like you are doing a great job there. Just an FYI - those two "L" shaped legs on the rear of the electronics bay can be removed if you plan to open up those bays. The L shaped supports were there mainly to help during the printing process.

I have to agree with the learned Pete (Retd), Liney-Ex. For the use of. A bit of an epic update Tony, and I must apologise for not commenting on your previous couple of posts. This was for a combination of reasons including, but not limited to: being busy, didn't have time, caught me at a bad time, was in awe, couldn't think of anything to add to what had already been said, and lastly, being pretty much speechless. I still can't think of anything to add here, other than - carry on Wasp'ing

Bill, I hope I caught you time... it was so long ago that I did these I'm not 100% certain, but I think I added a thicker boss at the base of the mrgb supports as an aid to printing - those should be removed. You should be able to see where that diameter changes, and that should be the cut line. Or my memory is completely shot, which is also a distinct possibility

nice work Bill. It's going to be a little corker

My cunning plan appears to have worked. I added some support bars inside the top housing to add rigidity while printing. Once the print was finished I left it for a couple of days to make sure the resin was dry. Then I cured the part in 30 second bursts, leaving it for a while between cures. It seems to have done the trick although cutting the support bars out and sanding the surface smooth again was a bit of a pain. THe front gates nestle together in a much more satisfactory way. There's still a little bit of warping going on but nothing to worry about. I've seen a lot worse on molded kits. The doors even open... the top ones at least. I'm still unsure as to whether I'll have them operable or not but there's plenty of time to decide. I had the first print still kicking about so I thought I'd put it to good use and use it as a paint mule. I gave it a black primer coat and then spilled some color on it. From left we have Alclad stainless steel, in the center (to the left of Robby) we have Alclad magnesium, and to the right we have Alclad RAF high speed silver. Yep, I'm trying to get rid of my Alclad paints, and besides, they were the closest thing to a silver I had apart from standard silver paint which I don't think would look any good on this. I wasn't too enamored with the stainless steel, but looking at it in this shot, it's started to grow on me. The Alclad magnesium has started to gloop so I had to thin it with acetone to get it to spray. Dammit. Looking at this photo I can't make up my mind. Any thoughts from the collective? I think the magnesium is closer to the color I thought I was going after, but the HS Silver looks quite good, and the stainless is growing on me. Dammit. Choose a color man, just choose! A test fit of the parts showed that everything is looking good so far. There's far less distortion in the parts than there was in the last print. Evident in that shot above are the small bosses I added to the flanges to help position the door flanges at the midpoint between flanges/ribs/sticky-outy things. and Robby nestles in nicely. The remainder of this afternoon was spent squirting black paint about everywhere. A lot of black paint. With more to come once this has all cured. Of course, I found a whole bunch of surface blemishes after I had sprayed the black so there will be another rubbing down session though I'm not going to go overboard looking for a mirror finish on this. Just enough to get rid of the worst of the scratches/blemishes.

I wouldn't be so sure Bill - I had to remove that little extension in order to get the seats to fit in mine

I spent a while sanding today but nothing worth showing yet. I did a test fit of the upper gates to see how things are coming together and noticed a few tweaks that are required. The front gates should sit halfway between those flanges, so I'm going to reprint the flanged cowl with some small stand-offs to more accurately position the gates. Another reason for reprinting that cowl is that we have a little bit of warping going on. The first test print was better but I cured this one in sunlight yesterday so perhaps it was a bit too strong. which resulted in the front gates being a wee bit skee-wiffy. Ignore the lower gates for the moment, they are just resting in place and not pinned yet - and they're a bit too short anyway. I have a cunning plan though and the new cowl is being printed as I type so it should be ready tomorrow sometime and we'll see if my plan has worked. Or not. I'm sure it will be alright on the night