hendie

Wouldn't that make your bum soggy?

hi Mike. I snaffled those photos as references when you posted them a while back - many thanks, they were very useful. However, I think those shots be of a modern "refurb" as there is no survival pack in the seat, and the blue cushion is merely imitating the shape. These two shots show the survival pack in place which is how I've modeled the seat - I've left it to the user to decide how to apply the sheepskin bum comforter

The seats are finished. Hendiebits vs Italeri bits in 1/48 Mocked up and in 1/72 Fitting is straightforward. I have used a single locating peg for mounting - simply drill a hole midway between the two kit mounting points and you should be good to go. I have also used a standoff on the rear of the seat upright to keep alignment/spacing from the bulkhead. This will need a light swipe with a sanding stick to tidy up as it was also used for the printing supports. Price for the seats will be $2.50 a pair for both 1/72 & 1/48. dammit! the more I look at that center console the more tempting it is to redo that as well

Bloomin' fantastic. You should be very pleased with that result. Great work.

it's great seeing you guys use these things in anger and getting such fantastic results.

It's coming to life Bill - slowly but surely. I'll bet Rupert snaffled it. I've never trusted that bear... nobody could be that nice

One of my all time favorite films is Forbidden Planet I've always loved Robby the Robot, and the transporter/jeep. I built a Robby a few years ago (8 or 9?), but always wanted to build a jeep to go along with him. With the advent of affordable home 3D printing, I finally got around to it. The build thread is over here... Robby by Polar Lights, and the Jeep was designed in Fusion from the original drawings and printed on an Elegoo Jupiter. Hemispheres butchered from Xmas baubles, seats melted from CD cases, and the seat cushions molded in silicone rubber. yes, the cushion has been fixed so it's now square to the seat. I really should build another Robby as my skills have come a long way since then, and now I have the printer, there's definitely a few upgrades lurking in the resin.

I think I found the reason, Pete... read on. Well, what a palaver this week has been. Only the seat cushions to make, and I knew how I wanted to make them - the same way I made the floor ,mats for my VW Bus a while back - using silicone. My choice of silicone was twofold - one, the silicone would conform nicely to the seat contours, looking "natural" and secondly, I purchased silicone dye's for the VW and that would allow me to customize the color of the cushions. All I had to do was make them. Ouch. I knew from my VW endeavours that using a 3D printed mold was problematic in that there's something in the resin that reacts with the silicone, but being an obstinate old sod, I thought I'd give it another try - this time curing the bejesus out of the resin before pouring the silicone. It was obvious after a coupleof days that this was still a no-no (see bottom right of pic). Then I remembered that I had used plasticine or was it blue-tac?) to make a mold for the floor mats. Out with the last lump of plasticine and more molds made. Okay, it must have been blue-tac because the silicone reacted with the plasticine and I ended up with a sticky mess. (see top right of pic) At that point I decided to start using my head for a change, but only after I remembered I had a vacuformer. I printed off a couple of cushions and used those to vacform some molds. See 3 decent looking cushions on left of pic. With the vacuformer I made two molds in standard old white plasticard, and I made one mold from polystyrene sheet as I had plenty left over from trying to make the seats. The clear polystyrene produced by far the best mold, but...it was too good. Here's a shot of two cushions. On the left we have a cushion molded from the white styrene sheet, and on the right we have a cushion molded from the clear polystyrene. Notice the difference? The cushion from the white styrene has a nice satin finish, while the cushion from the clear polystyrene has a glass like, very, very shiny finish. Too shiny in fact. Luckily I had made two molds from white styrene. As for the color. I wanted a color that was almost silver in appearance so went for a very light grey. I used white dye as the base with a smidgin of black, and a touch of blue to take away from the harshness of just a black and white grey. With hindsight I could have gone for a slightly darker shade, but I going to go with this. The color is growing on me - honest! They look better when I remove all the background clutter. and with that, it's finished. Simple huh? I suppose you want a few shots now eh? and apologies in advance - I just noticed in these shots that one of the cushions is a bit skeewiff. It's sorted now but I'm not retaking the shots as the transporter/jeep is now safely ensconced in the display cabinet. Robby's new home. and now the reason for the seats being offset from the footwells. It is so that the seats are centered on the hemisphere shields. That's all folks. I've wanted one of these transporters for years, but was not willing to pay the crazy high prices being asked. Thank heavens for 3D printing.

It's looking better with every update. I'm still taken aback by how impressive that engine bay looks

Thanks Johnny. They're by no means perfect but I'm not going to spend any more time on them, aside from polishing. Talking of seats... The seat stanchions were built up and the seats glued onto the boss using E6000 as that gives a really strong bond, but also gives me plenty time to do the fine adjustments i.e. trying to get everything square/parallel, perpendicular/flat and with any luck, in the right place I utilized the latest in high-tech jig making to ensure both seats were at the correct height relative to the jeep floor. Then spent ages making sure everything was symmetrical or I'd have to jump off a cliff. Ah, you've noticed have you? The seats are not located in the center of the footwell/floor section, are they? Well, believe it or not, the originals weren't either - at least according to the plans. I checked, double checked , and triple checked, the seats were definitely positioned slightly outboard of the centerline of the footwell. Believe me - that took a long time of fidgeting about before I was happy to leave it be. Because the seats are only located on a single tubular pole, and the pole is at an angle, if the seat pan wasn't flat, the seat looked all kinds of skeewiff. I'm still not sure if it's perfect but I don't think I can do any better. One thing I am happy with is how the seat supports turned out. I took the opportunity when the E6000 was out to play, to finally glue the two hemisphere's into the main housing. I still need to give the whole model a good cleanup - it's been sitting on my bench for weeks while I've been working away on other things, hence the dustclouds everywhere. At close of play tonight we are now here. Here being almost there! The seats need yet another polish. I spent ages polishing them, but then had to handle the little blighters to actually fit them, so they got fingerprinted all over again. Polishing them in situ is not a task I look forward to but it doesn't seem like I have much choice in this situation. If things go well, the last components should be ready tomorrow. If things don't go well, it could be another week or two before this thing finally gets finished. Oh, the suspense. And before anyone asks, - No! I'm not going to print up a 1/12 Leslie Nielsen to sit behind Robby. Not a chance.

Wow. That is looking rather special. I love it. @HartDeco, René, I hope you don't mind... there's one last thing I would add to this. Outboard of the two gnomes, there are two struts (painted green in lower left corner of this picture). Those would be an easy add-on, and would help complete the picture. There's also a steel pipe running from the floor up to the outlet at the top of the oil cooler, but this is a more difficult piece to add. On the other hand - you've done such a fantastic job there, I may be tempted to leave as is, so there's no chance of damaging the work already done. Alan

More glacial like progress was encountered over the last week or so. The polystyrene sheets I ordered turned up, and I set about melting them. Not very well I might add. The sheets were 1mm thick and after melting a few I decided they were a bit on the thin side. Searching around proved fruitless as the next thickness I p that was reasonably priced was 1/8 inch or nearly 4mm - way too thick. Back to the CD cases then. After a couple of hours I sort of lost the will to live. I managed to get one good one, and two that aren't perfect, but will be good enough. They'll get a right good polishing before they get fitted. I must have gone through two dozen CD cases to get those 3 parts. After that debacle I remodeled the seat base and printed a few of those, followed by a quick squirter of gloss black, then RAF High Speed Silver. Some brass rod was cut to length and given the same coloring in treatment. I will let those harden up for a few days before protecting them with a gloss coat. That just leaves one more thing - the seat pads. The current line of thinking is that I'll do those the same way I did the floor mats on the VW. I do have some silicone mat that is the perfect color and the right thickness, but I'd need to cut it to shape and that means the seat cushions would have sharp edges, and I want them nice and rounded. Stay tuned to see if my idea works out

I built both the Roden and the Eduard versions. Both builds are in this thread. I never finished the Roden kit but that was because if my own inexperience and cack handedness. The Roden kit is a more challenging build, but the quality of the molding is much better imo. And I think, slightly more accurate. The other downside to the Roden is that the engine (wonderfully detailed) doesn't fit inside the cowling unless you cut off a few bits. If I was doing it again, I'd still go for the Roden version.

A nice idea in principle, Mike, but much harder to execute. The amount of time spent not just in setting up and printing, but in 3 washes, curing, and trimming... followed by packaging etc. It's not as quick and easy as it first seems - as I learned. I spent almost every evening and weekends over many weeks in order to fulfill the orders I received. By the time you add the costs of packaging etc into the mix, there's really not a whole lot of profit in this endeavor. Then there would be a profit split - obviously the someone has to get paid, and I honestly doubt anyone would sign up for the amount of effort required.

That's extremely heartening to hear guys. Thank you. I still feel bad about the high cost of the postage but there's not a lot I can do about it... nor the postmasters. The last time I went to the post office I had two packages to send. By the time I got to the head of the queue there was another 8 people behind me. I was asked to stand aside while they dealt with everyone else and they finally got to me when they closed the post office at 1pm. I was in there for over an hour and a half. In other matters, resin arose from the goo and we got a result. Italeri and Hendiebits side by side. See if you can guess who made which one. Another side by side showing detail in a better light. The lightening holes in the frame are partially obscured due to the print orientation and the fact that resin lies in the bottom of the holes and gets cured but a dark wash should hide that. I did try drilling out those holes but cracked two seats, so decided to leave well alone. I went ahead and (roughly) painted one up to get an idea of what the finished article would look like. I've seen seat backs in blue vinyl, a tan colored cloth, and also in a dark green cloth. I've gone for the green here. I mentioned earlier about the seat width and how making it any narrower would make it look silly. Here is a hendiebits seat in place along with the collective lever fitted. Note: The hendiebits seat is located by a single peg on the rear, so a new hole requires to be drilled in the bulkhead - or you can just cut the peg off and glue it using the standoffs. In this shot I also redrilled the locating hole for the collective lever as Italeri have it too high (and lowering it gives more room for the seat). It's undoubtedly a tight fit, but it can be done. Thinning out the fuselage sidewalls a tad would go a long way to getting it all to play nicely together, but it does fit. But it bugged me. It kept bugging me. I checked numerous photos and as far as I can ascertain, the seat is in the right position relative to the window and everything else, but it still doesn't look quite right. I checked how much of the seat frame is visible from outside the aircraft, and the relation of the top of the window to the top of the seat etc. It's an easy cop out to say something appears to be out with the italeri cockpit dimensions, but that's what I'm going to have to go with here. I think the center console and the bulkhead panel are just a fraction too wide. So I went back to the drawing board. The seat you see in the photos above is the larger one shown here below. I reworked the seat making it 0.4mm narrower, and 0.8mm shorter, and placed them side by side for your viewing pleasure. Looking at these screenshots, the width to height ratio looks all wrong compared to the 1:1, but I can't deviate much from this or it's going to look even worse when fitted to the kit. I'll try printing off this version later this weekend if I get a chance, and then we'll see how it looks. More experimentation to come.

It's a no-go with Shapeways I'm afraid. I just uploaded the model, selected their finest detail material and got the following results: They're informing me that the areas shown in red will not print successfully due to not meeting their minimum wall thickness requirements. Which we all know is absolute tripe, but when dealing with the dunderheids at Shapeways you are really fighting a losing battle. I could beef those sections up for the Shapeways model, but then it's going to look as much a caricature of the real seat as the Italeri part does, thereby defeating the purpose of this model.

That engine bay looks great René, even without the gnomes sticking out. I'm sure you'll do a fantastic job with the rest. I thought I would update here rather than junk up your main thread Chris. A new bunch of seats have been printed and I'll post photos later. That's the good news. The bad news, and there's no easy way to say this, but I don't think the postage rates will change. I think taping the seats between two sheets of cardboard would protect them in a bubble mailer, but I was checking the USPS website this morning and it appears that a padded envelope is still considered a "package", therefore subject to the same rates as a box. I can try uploading the model to Shapeways to see if they can print it (though I think they will reject at least one feature), but their minimum pricing has been escalating at a horrendous rate recently. I'll report back on that once I try it.

by themselves, no. At that scale the resin does not have enough rigidity to provide much, if any support. However, they can be printed with a hole through the length into which a brass rod can be inserted. I don't have any shots to hand but here the same principle is used on a 1/48 Wapiti undercarriage to add strength. Here is the finished, completely 3D printed Wapiti. All the struts had a 0.5mm brass rod inserted through the entire length of the strut to provide strength

Now that's a beetleback!

You're nothing if not resourceful, Bill. I have faith

My first guess is that those two spindly sidewalls are flexing when it comes to printing the top section. There's no reason you can't have supports coming up the inside and attaching internally to those top sections. First thing I would do if you're determined to keep that grid like base [I'm not a fan of that) is cut a big hole in it and add standard supports from there up into the structure to give it some rigidity.

I did Chris. The 1/72 sets turned out fine for that kit but the 1/48 are a tight fit in the bigger version. I'll try and post some shots later. I might need to print some more 1/48 as I think I've discarded the test prints now I'm not sure the kit collective lever will fit with the 1/48 seats as is, but if I make them any narrower, they look far too skinny.

that all looks great to me Chris. The only thing to watch out for now is the fit of the mesh over the top - that could be fiddly and maybe need a tweak or two.

Here's one shot showing how the frame is recessed back in the housing, and the small gauge mounted on the frame. Another showing the general layout I wish I had spotted that shot before as the cooling fan is a lot further back than I thought. Mea culpa. Still, it should be an easy job just to remove material at the back end of the fan to fit it sitting further back. Will you be doing the plumbing? 😁

think yourselves lucky. Here in the good old USA 99% of the population don't know the difference between ensure, insure, and assure. I've even seen professionally produced medical equipment with "Insure all sharps..." labels The one that really grinds my gears though is when people refer to * as an asterix. I once modified a colleagues presentation and replaced all the asterisks with a small Gaul warrior as an educational opportunity.