andymoore

I'm declaring this one finished ..... for now

outstanding work - every home should have one

I was given a resin printer at Xmas,So I'm now redoing the sphere

great work so far - that's a real shame with that outrigger, but I'm sure Revell will replace, I've always found their spares service to be really good. If you don't have any joy, I could probably print a set of fully made up outriggers .

A year or so ago I was browsing Thingiverse & came across a stunning project to build a 1/48 scale Lunar module. I downloaded the entire project immediately - which was lucky as it appears to have subsequently removed from thingiverse & is now only available as a paid for download. Although I must say 31 euros is a bargain for this model, which can be found here. At the time I only had an FDM printer & after looking at the parts decided that trying to print it would be madness. Since then Xmas has come & gone - and I'm now the proud owner of an Elegoo Mars resin printer. So here we go..... The main part of the descent stage is made up of two main pieces. Here it is with the first of the four outriggers attached. And here it is again next to the 1/72 Airfix LM The 3D printed parts aren't all that go into this - the master model maker that designed this has created a web site showing how to put the thing together & has included a number of patterns & decal sheets that can be printed out. I am in total awe of this guy - the attention to detail is astounding. his website can be found here. The first patterns to use are for cutting out foil shapes to cover the descent stage. It takes a long time. I've use kitchen foil painted black, unpainted kitchen foil, gold foil, bronze foil & coffee coloured foil. That's pretty much as far as I've got so far with the descent stage. The ascent stage is a totally different beast. All the panels can be printed out. I have tried using a Brother Colour laser printer, printing on silver pearlescent vinyl sheets. The first attempt was just a mess of colour & nearly destroyed the printer. Since then I have had some success, although the colour seems to fade as the page gets halfway through the printer. My next attempt was to print on clear waterslide decal paper & then apply the decals to the pearlescent sheets, this has come out a lot better. Some of the panels do need to be bent, or formed around some complex shapes, the decals for these have been applied to sticky backed aluminium tape. I also cut slivers of the tape to make the joins between the panels.

I reckon the AE35 units have an unfairly bad reputation - I've never known one to fail....

There is a guy on thingiverse working on a remodelled front end, with a pod bay door open & all the interior. My model is all on a single steel rod & the main parts are not glued together, so there is a good possibility that I will remodel the front end with a pod bay door open (no matter what HAL says). I will be adding an EVA pod at some point too.

stripped down the whole thing for a final coat of paint. then i put it all back together & hung it up....

i'd be interested to see your pics when you can link them. The sphere is nowhere near as good as I want it at the moment, but I will assemble & complete the model with the current sphere & maybe reprint it in a few months time when I'm convinced I have the printer tuned better.

All parts now printed - I need to do a lot of work on the sphere, it looks dreadful at the moment, everything has a coat of primer now - so lots of painting & the tidy up of the sphere left to do.

I had to put this on hold for a while as I had some issues with the printer & it took me a month to fathom out what I was doing wrong. Anyway, printing has resumed now, the rear section is complete & I'm slowly working my way along the centre sections... the rear is made up of four main sections - then covered with two square plates on the top & two on the underside.. each of the centre sections is made up of three modules joined together with three 3-sided 'nuts & then each of these sections is joined to the next one with a small separating collar. I'm hoping to get these pieces tidied up over the weekend & get an initial coat of Vallejo primer sprayed over it all. Looking at the movie, the original appears to be all the same colour except for a few panels on the front sphere - I'll probably shade a few more sections just to highlight the detail.

WeIl expect.to use about 1kg of filament - I pay £19 per kg. Power consumption is around 50watts - and it's going to (roughly) be 90 hrs of printing. The stringy bits are removeable, most of them can be pulled off with a pair of tweezers. I'll try to record here how long the printing takes. Biggest cost will be the 1m steel rod that I'll use to strengthen it.

I've had my current 3d printer for around 6 months & have now got it tuned to the point that I feel confident to tackle a large project. I'm going to try to build a model of Discovery - the deeps space ship that appears in 2001 A Space Odyssey. I found the 3d model on thingiverse https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:950664 The scale is approximately 160:1 & when built is should measure just over a metre long. The printer is a Geeetech A10 & I'm using Eryone PLA filament. The first parts I've printed are the engines & a handful of the pods that make up the long section of the body. I guess that it's going to take me to the end of next month to print all the parts & I hope to have the whole thing complete before the end of the year. Here's a picture of the first few bits:

I built a paper saturn V a few years ago for my daughter's school project (she did get involved... sort of) It ended up pinned to the wall of her classroom for over a year. I used this link http://jleslie48.com/gallery_models_real.html The one big tip is - use heavy weight paper. I used cheap photocopier paper & the 1st stage had slightly buckled walls. having said that, the quality of the model you can create is astounding & it's good fun. If you mess a bit up, you just have to reprint it. You might want to test the water with something a bit simpler first. My first attempt was the Ares I (also available on the same site), you can knock this up in an evening & I promise you will not be disappointed.

beautifully done - and great photography