This will be my first WIP build here on Britmodeller. After watching bengalensis’s awesome Saturn V come together I know this will be a good place to share my continuing adventure trying to build one of these things myself. I’ve been working on this project, on and off, for a number of years now. It started as a scratch build using the 1/72 Dragon Apollo 10 kit and plastruct tube, then later on kit-bashing the actual full Dragon Saturn V kit, I then started 3D modeling parts to correct the Dragon kit to produce at Shapeways, and now I’m 3D modeling to print a completely new model on my own SLA printers. There have been many, many iterations that have come and gone, but I’ve gotten to the point now where this is the path, and I'm going to complete this thing come what may.
I decided to start back, building from ground up, with the first stage.
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.
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.
The intertank corrugations. This was one of the details I really wanted to try to represent as accurately as I could.
The brackets that connect to the tank “Y” flanges were especially entertaining to model.
S-IC forward skirt. I’m currently working on an inner ring that will nestle down inside for the interior details and also act as a support for the LOX bulkhead dome.
Cut the two Plustruct ABS tubes that will represent the Fuel and LOX tanks to length and dry stacked the whole stage.
Thanks guys! 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. Pretty surprised the little diagonal supports came out as well as they did. I’ve also started modeling the LOX bulkhead.