TheBaron

I agree - glad you've gotten better results Nick. The whole lift/distance thing took me ages to work out too!

I think you must have had a dud as you suggested Nick - have been running mine for over a year now with only 4 fails out of about 100+ or so prints, and two of those were due to dialling in a new set of resins recently. Obvious question but was your S2 levelled ok?

Sorry to read of the recent paint woes Bill but tempered by news of your recent triumphs with bus and Belvedere. Warmest congratulations mate. More Wessex here than Alfred the Great. 😁

Evening everyone; hoping this finds you all doing ok? Days of dramatic cloudplay here of late as the equinoctial gales rock in from the Atlantic: Had to light the stove for the first time yesterday as well so no doubting the presence of Autumn now, that, and picking the last of the apples for storage. Quite apt considering the toil and trouble it takes to get calibrated correctly at times Pete! Either that or the 'pucker-plate'... Consider it done: thanks Pete. Also noticed I'd been regularly referring to the bits that the rear set of legs attach to as sponsons; re-reading Ciastula's monograph on the P.531 revealed that he calls them 'winglets' instead. It amazes you Woody? Thoroughly bloody bewilders me much of the time! 'Modelling', you might almost say Giorgio! I fear I'd be printing cobwebs at that stage Bill! I've been busily combining parts over the last few weeks in order to cut down on the sheer volume of components involved in the kit, so as both rotor hub and main rotor shaft are now a single component and the latter needed to be printed from Hard Tough anyway so that the base where it mounts into the MRGB wouldn't snap off, by default the hub will get the same treatment: It feels like the project reached a turning-point over the last fortnight as I reckon that's slighyly over 50% od the design work now completed. Having gotten sooo bored of CAD work of late I very much wanted to move on to some other aspect of the project for a while, so had a final fling at completing surface detailing on the underside of the rear section: Main features under there are the main tank sump, weapon fusing connections, telebriefing socket, and a multitude of other sockets and connections of which I have no idea...also not forgetting the tie-down release hook in its nest: Other minor fitings I'd forgotten about to this point also were the tiedown shackles on the sides of the engine deck (these'll be printed due to falling into the 'most likely bit to snap off during support removal' category): - and connection back and front for the brake lines: With that done, everything from the back wall of the cabin to the tail-rotor was complete and ready for test printing: In the sprit of Look & Learn magazine: there were two errors in that above image which I caught before printing - any guesses what they are? An ancillary reason to take a sabbatical from CAD work for a while was in terms of quality control and efficiency, which involved running some tests between various pieces of slicer software. Most of the time I use Lychee for support workflow but was recently very much taken with Voxeldance's Tango in this respect, so ran a whole series of comparisons over the last week that led to something of a boneyard of test prints appearing on the window sill over a period of days: Having mentioned above about wanting to combine parts wherever possible, you can see how the engine deck and boom were done as a single unit - partly because with the Saturn 2 there is no no reason not to print much larger volumes, but partly also due to that point where the rear of the engine deck curves inward to meet the conical cross-section of the boom. I'd noticed a tendency on previous test prints of the engine deck alone for it to warp inwards when curing just enough at the top so that it made for a messy junction with the boom. Problem averted in a classic example of the materials deciding what needs doing. The sheer volume of parts too had been a growing concern; if it's just yourself you can always muddle through of course but with others wanting copies of this, you have to offer something which doesn't require the same depth of reference materials and a book of instructions the size of a Harold Robbins. For a regions like the Nimbus I was able to incorprorate the PE and minor components into a far more practicable set of units, without any cost to accuracy: Same for the reduction gearbox which had acquired an insane amount of little PE elements over time to a degree which would have been frustrsting enough at 1/24 to assemble and at 1/32 impossible: this too has now been rationlized as a printable unit: That's another change occurring at this point in the build, making sure to simultaneously test for both 1/24 and 1/32 scales. The following are all just test prints (not the final thing) so not cleaned up after print beyond having the bigger supports removed: avert your eyes from any messy stubs and remaining mini-supports you find visible in the shots... I'd kind of expected that there might be some details at 1/24 that didn't survive scaling down to 1/32, so it's a testament to the Saturn 2 that I couldn't find a single instance of anything tiny which didn't survive the transition. Details pleasingly sharp at 1/24: - remained so at 1/32: Some general views: Test print of a (1/24) clamshell: All quite reassuring in terms of quality but an allied issue regarding the engine deck was quite how and in what order the parts should be assembled, given that there are several critial alignments that happening simultaneously between MRGB mounts, driveshaft, reduction gerarbox, oil cooler and the Nimbus (along with its own mounting points). This I eventually managed to solve due to the rather unique support design system in Voxeldance Tango, which allowed me to be a lot more creative in supporting combined parts to a degree which previously I would have found too complex in something like Lychee or Chitubox: Specifically this meant being able to print the MRGB along with its struts and the front ECU mounting as a single part: - including the front servo and pitch control beam underneath: In terms of fitting to the deck, that whole gubbins now just slots home with all its components accurately aligned in a single operation: I haven't forgotten that other hydraulics need to go under there btw - these can be slipped in beneath the MRGB at an angle during assembly. There's a couple of outrigger struts on either side of the rear sets of support struts on the MRGB but as they complicated the supporting of the main unit too much they'll have to be printed separately. Reduction gearboxes also with elements combined to minimize use of PE: Avengines Assembled: 1/24: 1/32: In photographs it's hard to distinguish between the scales most of the time: that will really kick in however when it comes to adding pipework details and the electrical system. In relation to such tasks, these bits may have looked a little odd in one of the above shots: They're a jig that I thought a necessity for holding and rotating the engine without damage during detailing and painting - especially when it come to threading all that pipework around the countours: Happy now that those major sections are working together (in terms of assmebly) at both scales. I need to go back and adjust a handful supports and in terms of the Nimbus itself, I reckon I'll revert to printing it in three sections as I'd done previously to make cleanup easier after printing. Otherwise on to the next test: a full-up undecarriage print in both scales along with rotor shaft and hub, printed in the eSun Hard Tough: That was a bit of a long one. Hope it was worth the read. Take care until the next one. Tony

- a series of quotes from other vehicles flying in magnificent formation. Pete your inventiveness is a constant joy.

Significant progress of a non-virtual kind to report for once this time around. Thanks Serkan. Your own work has been an inspiration when it comes to reproducing surface detail! Another year without a Scalextric set then.... 😭 Actually THIS is the cracking undercarriage update Chris due to me standing on the test print! 🤦‍♂️ They weren't...but now that you mention it Ian that is a very useful notion indeed and for which I thank you. Modified: Henceforth these are 'the Brandy-slots'! I must confess that I hadn't anticipated the sheer volume of detail that would need to be represented at 1/24th Giorgio, and the trouble is of course, you add it to one region and then have to add it to all the others lest you end up with the painful modelling equivelent of terra incognita for parts parts of the airframe. I don't know if I've posted this link before but you get a good view of the characteristically insect-like undercarriage of the Wasp in operation here during deck landing trials on the mechanical simulator which they built for this purpose at RAE, Bedford, in 1963: Similarly, the footage (8mm I think) here of Arethusa's Wasp in 1972 show the surprising grace with which this helicopter could alight at sea: That sequence contains some highly useful views of the windshields on either side of the cockpit in mitigation of the (usually-removed) front doors, an arrangement I'll be following in my own designs here. The relative delicacy of the undercarriage structures meant that simply reproducing them in standard resin was never going to be a realistic option on grounds of strength, so I've spent a hefty wodge of time recently looking at some of the alternative engineering resins available which posess much higher flex and hardness ratios than standard mixtures. There are quite a few so-called web-portals comparing various offerings, the bulk of which are little more than copy/pastes from corporate brochures minus any actual evidence of the writer using them. These sites are simply a waste of everyone's time. Given the eye-watering cost of the high-end engineering and dental stuff, you really don't want to take a punt on the basis of such garbage so it took a good bit of digging around on Y-tube to find relaible visual evidence of a kind which would point you in the right direction. Price was obviously a major factor so after watching a particularly useful review from Jeremy over at Figure Feeback, I decided to give this stuff a go after finding it on offer for a 1/3 off the usual price: It's one thing to compare datasheeets but another thing entirely to actually hold the stuff in your hand as a printed object: This calibration test is about 2.5mm thick and I simply could not break it using my hands; in fact suspect you'd need to put it in a vice and whack it with a club hammer to be sure of snapping it. Print and process is a little different from standard resins in that the layer exposure times are about 30% longer and washup afterwards is more effective with ethanol than IPA - in fact ignore the bubbles on the surface of the exposure chip above as these are due to me using IPA the first time out and it not getting rid of all the resin. Second time around I just used methylated spirits and it cleaned up perfectly. Curing times are waaaaaaaay longer at 30 minutes under the UV. Print quality? Well being a translucent blue in this instance your first view of the u/c legs is like trying to judge the accuracy of something made from jelly! A light snort of some Tamiya ocean grey however and any fears were allayed: Ordinarily I wouldn't expect to see layer lines using the Saturn 2 of the kind visible above on the side of the castoring unit; these appear here from from a combination of not using any anti-aliasing allied to reproducing the whole u/c as a single part so that it isn't oriented correctly to avoid such artifacts on that region: Cultösaurus Erectus? On the final version of the u/c the 'horseshoe' of the wheel mounting is now a separate moving part so that the wheels can be angled for either for sea or land deployments, as a result giving me more freedom to rotate the castoring pillar at the printing stage: Given that engineering resins are designed for strength rather than detail, I was impressed by how much detail of the undercarriage Esun's Hard Tough stuff perserves: Qualitatively it's not until you get up close with the magnifying visor that you see it's not quite as sharp as the results from standard display resins, however, considering the trade-off in pursuit of strength, this seems a perfectly acceptable balance to strike on such an occasion. I duly celebrated the culmination of this research by clumsily treading on the painted part as I walked over to get the camera to photograph it, which explains why it now debuts minus a couple of struts... Will this prove strong enough then for the Wasp to sit on those legs then? Well one thing about watching all that footage of the Wasp landing is that you realize how the big heavy diagonal of the oleo bears the brunt of the aircraft's weight and at scale here, I think the oleo will prove resilient enough for the job using the Esun stuff. Alongside the above I've been working on getting the engine deck and boom areas finished so an update on progress there in a few days. Take care until then. Tony

Getting your snout in the Trough followed by some Defiance sounds like a great weekend in the offing for all concerned Steve. 'Country inn': are there any finer words in the language?

Given the irrepressible quality of your work as a rule I don't know why the underside in particular looks so compelling here Giorgio, but it does! Vivacious results as always.

Didn't you just? 😁 The precision and attention to detail here remains exemplary Anthony. Great to see you rocking this again. 'Flight delayed' I think that means you owe yourself a free night at a hotel as compensation Colin. 😁

J3 = A1. A lovely piece of work Chris.

Should be displayed with a small plaque which reads 'By Fabergé of Yorkshire'. Steve that looks impeccable.

Looks almighty fine inside and out Colin - a splendid sense of observation and precision coming through in spades. Lovely stuff.

Horseshoes and Oast Houses A good Indian Summer morning to you all. 8am on a September morning hotter than it's been all summer in this neck of the woods. The above title should become self-explanatory later, after the mail of course... Rang 'em up to check and now been reported to Interpol as an unregistered miniature arms dealer. #freethebaron I'm in no position to mock Pete having spent the last six months getting a cardigan to exactly the right levels of baggy and shapeless with all the care that we we used to distress denim jackets with as teenagers. By the hokey couldn't he play the harmonica too: Even Annie Nightingale seemed bemused at that! Thanks Bill: goes with the territory I guess doesn't it? 😄 Always frankly surprised there was never a purgatorial Cormac McCarthy novel about modellers adrift on a prairie of ambiguous aircraft shapes.... And at such length... Many thanks Chris: the remorseless logic of time that only after prolonged familiarization with a particular aircraft do you really get a handle on how essential features triangulate with one to reveal error. You've hit the nail on the head Ian: it's one thing to have to deal with the impact of your own inaccuracies, another matter entirely to leave others subject to them. 'Spirit of the forum' and all that Terry. 😁 (Couldn't use the saluting emoji on the BM software as it looks like Zippy from Rainbow being beaten senseless with a carrot.) I cannot disagree with that sentiment. It's a cliche often repeated that in Wasps as in life, nothing is ever as straighforwards as it appears; in fact neither 'straight' nor 'forward' do justice to the exercise in trigonometry that is the Wasp's undercarriage. Over time my initial (and deeply naive) sketch map of its general arrangement was replaced by a series of terse notes to self and numbers regarding how wide of the mark many of my original suppositions were: True of course that each of the four sets of legs is identical, but untrue in terms of the arrangement of upper and lower legs regarding length, angle, and diameter. This will not be news to those already familiar with the Wasp from modelling or real-life of course, but was most certainly a humbling lesson in supposition for me. The problems encountered were visual and in hindsight, glaringly obvious ones. Put simply, the perspective from a characteristic viewing angle or the distorting effect of the camera lens in closer views - not infrequently both - can all add up to some erroneous conclusions that only fall apart at the point of reconciling individual parts with one another in space. One of the most effective strategies I found was to look at a single part on it's own - say, one of the struts - and then examine that one element alone in multiple phptos and in manual drawings; note down what you see, repeat for neighbouring parts and then finally compare with one another. From a photo-interpretation point of view, the darker RN colours ironically make it difficult to clearly distinguish critical details in this way, so of greatest benefit here were pictures of Brazilian and Indonesian and Dutch Wasps up on Flickr, those lighter colour schemes necessarily providing less ambiguous outlines. Due to it giving the clearest set of alignment point 'twixt airframe and undercarriage, I started at the back where pretty quickly on in adding the under-sponson bracings you get a sense of how the 'box-girder chassis' underlying the Wasp's skin emerges at critical points for things to bolt onto: In fact, bearing in mind how critical it is to not only have all parts align with one another as painlessly as possible during construction but to simultaneously design for the weight of the helicopter to sit upon the undercarriage, the box-girder principle gave me some good pointers towards a practicable construction process, as you'll see later on. Due to their not-infrequently complex topology, recreating forged parts in CAD can be a time-consuming process, as was the case with those for the mounting shackles on the u/c struts: The front one of the top pair taking even longer than the first to get looking acceptable: Knowing how easy it can be to obsess over small details to the detriment of the larger picture, I made sure prior to starting this work that things were being laid out in accordance with the dimensions in the Wasp's Operating Data manual regarding horizontal extents: Sometime previously I'd found a set of Imperial dimensions online for the Dunlop tyres on the Wasp as well which tallied exactly with @Anthony in NZ's physical measurments to a T (or should that be a > in the case of the undercarriage here?), which meant work could also begin on blocking-in the the vertical for the castoring undercarriage unit: Tucked away down under there between the diagonal braces was this step-like feature: Nowhere did I find any reference as to what this feature actually was until not for the first (or last) time turning to the ever-reliable cutway in the original Flight to learn it is a mounting for the weapon parachutes. There you go. Now would be a good idea to mention ideas for mounting the undercarriage onto the Wasp strongly simply and securely: the initial idea being to design and print the castoring unit, struts and mounting girders as a single item to be slid into place from the side however, the uprights and diagonal braces put the mockers on that proposal so I went for the next least-complicated version, namely, girders, uprights and diagonals to slide upward into place from underneath as a single unit: A slot/tab principle being used to permit accurate alignment of the girders, along with pin/hole for the diagonals on the sponsons. Once in place there should be no traces visible of that mechanism: Probably the greatest portion of time taken up on the whole undercarriage was in reproducing struts and oleos at the correct size and angles, along with the castoring units and various mounting plates and brackets: I'm not happy with the oleo which should be a bit chunkier in my view however it'll have to stay as it is for the simple reason that with the whole aircraft effectively resting on those such small mounting points at the sides, I've had to enlarge those mounting brackets/attachments for strength beyond the demands of scale accuracy. As a result a wider oleo would merge into the top rear strut attachment in a way that looks particularly awful - particularly up front on the side of the cabin wall. Under these circs. the compromise has to be a slightly thinner oleo in order to preserve the physical separation between it and the rear strut as striking the least of two false notes. In terms of the assembly process however, this allows the whole unit to slide into place from the side: You can see the relevant sockets in the sponson to allow for this to be as seamless a process as possible, along with provision for a couple of metal pegs to help position/strengthen attachment of the lower struts to the box girder: Both sides in place now: With slightly different mounting brackets in the fuselage up front for the legs I had to redesign those parts but was able to preserve my original mounting idea of having the whole strut/castor assembly slide into place from the side as a single unit: I'll claim simplicity rather than elegance on this in terms of preserving accurate alignments however the inevitable trade-off involved needing to extend the mounting slot out to the edge of the fusleage where it would become apparent: To solve this I've added a couple of blanks that can be fixed into place to hide such sleight of hand: That's about all I'm fit for this time around guys. Despite the regrettable instance of oleo-deviancy, the overall contours are at least becoming gradually Waspacious: Nearly forgot the title! The wheels - held in place by gert agricultural horseshoe brackets so reminscent of those on the Anson's undercarriage, whilst the canted tops to the castoring units remind me of the Kent vernacular: Image credit: Wikipedia Trialling some new high-strength resin for those spindly legs this week so should have something physical to show next time around. Tony

I would buy a car from your dealership; no question. 😁

You've made a great fist of that Mike, truly splendid looking piece of work. Interesting to see that Pete has also opened a scale version of Kwikfit when it comes to changing tyres!

Sorry to hear about the medical problems with your intakes Bill but the fuselage is coming along very nicely.

Exceptionally fine work Serkan - I've said it before but your control over surface detailing is exquisite.

Look after yourself Daddy M. This'll keep and so will we. 🫂

The crispness and definition of those structures is beyond the power of usual praise-phrases like 'superb' or 'excellent' to convey, so it's going to have to be a respect-full Wow!!!! from me Tom.

That's an interesting observation Bill because I experienced exactly the same issue on the Wasp as well. Beginning to think that there's something perceptually weird about cone shaped things as I kept seeing the MRGB back then as far taller than it really was. Briefly considered including a Flake with my initial attempt so that it could displayed as a 99. This is intensely observed and delicate work here Bill: without a doubt the results will look amazing. D'you reckon there'd be much of a market for bringing out Pete's legs as an AM set?

'A Word From Our Sponsons' Bit of a subdued week since the last update on account of finding a - visually minor but structurally fatal - mistake in my work. Entirely down to my own incomptence/inattentiveness I'm afraid and a situation which meant I had to go back to where the work was almost exactly a year ago and drastically revise the designs in their infancy, so fundamental was the matter. It was a toss up by Thursday evening who was going to have a nervous breakdown first, me or Fusion, as it would have to spend up to 15 minutes at a times simply computing changes back that far. The only ameliorating factor in the whole experience was discovering an entire album from XTC's catalogue that for some reason I'd never bought when it was released back in 1984 and so had this on loop for much of the time. I think there will be quite a number of features in the 'paint-prior-to-inaccessibly-and-irrevocably-fixing-to-the-airframe' category Pete. The whole kit prob'ly... Thinking of casting it and attaching it to the undersides in lieu of a Mk.46! It's alright for me being familiar with the subject but at this point in time Giorgio I'm starting to wonder how on earth to produce a set of instructions that will enable somebody else to assemble their copy of the kit. I'm not sure that printed media will be a feasible mechanism tbh and am thinking about producing some kind of digital, interactive equivalent. Cheers Colin. I just hope to God it all sticks together as well! Which reminds me, I still need to take measurements of the various supporting struts in order to be able to cut them to length from brass tubing later. It sounds like that might have been XS537, scrapped at Portland in 1992? https://www.helis.com/database/cn/356/ Can't find a cartoon on the Model Art decal sheet unfortunately. 😁 Yep. Once the 1/24th version is ready James I'll turn to adapting the designs for 1/32. I suspect at that scale some of the PE features of the larger kit will need to be printed as part of the larger assemblies on grounds of constructability, if nothing else! Most kind of you Anthony and it goes without saying - but shall do so again - how much your photos and meaurements have informed this process! I've similar memories of seeing the same thing at the same age Kareara, living in the vicinity of Yeovilton for part of my childhood. So where did things go wrong? Back in September of last year when this project got underway in earnest and I'd started blocking out the main shapes of the airframe, as can be the case in such matters you become so tunnel-visioned about getting these shapes to look right that you're not always thinking ahead to the kind of alignments which only become apparent when much later adding various features to the airframe: In the case of the undercarriage there are a significant number of issues involved in the way that both front and rear sets mount to the sides and underneath of the airframe which, if I'd been forward thinking enough earlier from that start last Autumn, would have crystallized out the information that: both front and rear undercarriage sets are identical both have to align with each other laterally fore and aft both have to align with each other vertically for and aft The sponsons on the above design were simply inaccurate in relation to the last two points above. Having recently trimmed their horizontal extents, the outer edges now matched the width of the front fuselage so that was fine, but the discrepancy in height for the mounting points vertically fore and aft was great enough that the mountings for the front set were above the height of the door sill! Graham's excellent shot from the BM walkaround section shows very nicely where the forward mounting strut attatches at this level (and why having it too high is such a grievous error to make): Said mounting accounting of course for that odd cutout which you see in the bottom of the front doors on a Wasp: There was no avoiding the fact that the sponsons needed lowering if front and rear attachment points were to equate. The problem was however that with their original dispositions buried umpteen gazillion computations back in the software over the course of the last year, unpicking any such details was going to prove a highly disruptive affair. Even with the parametric timeline in Fusion allowing you to step back in time as it were, the sheer quantity of changes involved meant that like travelling back in time to kill Hitler or Val Doonican, if you change the past you change the present in unanticipated ways. The inherent risk was that if you change too many of the early design steps, you break the causal chain of interdependency which all of the intervening design steps have woven over the last twelve months and thus effectively destroy the model. Which of course I did. Repeatedly. For days. 💥💥💥 Until by yesterday evening and with the aid of Train Running Low on Soul Coal looping on Itunes, the last of the causal breaks had been repaired and the sponsons - along with all their dependent details - successfully lowered by the required amount: Which as it turned out was a massive 1mm: seldom can so much heartbreak be so un-apparent in an image...🔬 More evident perhaps in a before and after: Using the hole for the mounting bolt as a datum, old/wrong height in red, new lowered height in green: the mounting points on the sponsons now therefore in a required agreemment with those on the fuselage. Perhaps not unexpectedly, having to do it all the second time around meant I was forced to redraft the design of the fairing around the sponson, this time using a far greater economy of technique for the compound curves to now flow into one another in a much more seamless fashion - especially at the front where they begin to merge back into the flat surfaces by degrees: I'm afraid this whole update is a long-winded way of saying 'everything is exactly as it was a week ago chaps...except a bit of the helicopter is now one millimetre lower'. In order to prevent any such errors creeping into the undercarriage I've been organizing the research imagery thematically: - then using this information to identify the key structural components, their arrangements in space, and ways of designing them to be printed in as few sections as possible: My thinking is that with the actual structures of the undercarriage being the same front and rear, it makes more sense to avoid creating a horribly complicated construction sequence for the struts and legs that is 'all elbows' to get positioned at the right angles (to each other and the airframe), and to print these up instead as self-contained units with everything at the right angle already. That way both front and rear legs can be accurately slotted into place on the airframe as a single operation. Time will tell. Rather helpfully somebody was recently selling the top pair of U/C struts on the Needbay, thus providing some additional detail: Met some friends for dinner up in Cavan during the week only to be greeted by what appeared to be a daunting 'miles-wide alien spacecraft enters earth's atmosphere' cloud formation above the car park: Nobody seemed that bothered, but then Cavan can be like that during the week. The above was painful to relate; hopefully it wasn't as painful to read. Have a great weekend all of you. Tony

You've got it well under control Chris - lovely progress.

Have to say that's looking magnificent Roger.

A cracking piece of design work from Pete and an equally compelling physical realisation in progress from yourself Mike. Exquisite.

Another bravura PiL production! Some people have a garden gnome, but oh no , not you....