TheBaron

Breaking: 'Police called to incident at Melchett Towers' https://www.thisiswhyimbroke.com/giant-inflatable-octopus-tentacles/

Sorry to hear of your undercarriage problems Terry but your interior regions are looking superb.

Kind of you as always James. I've been mining various archives for wider references beyond the - necessarily - dry technical reports above, by which to put some human clothing on the thread; progress in this having proven unanticipatedly nostalgic due to discovering some digital reproductions of National Geographic magazine from the 1960s covering various spaceflight missions: Anyhow, a handful of additional Gemini-useful references have turned up: Whiting, Cécile. “‘It’s Only a Paper Moon’: The Cyborg Eye of Vija Celmins.” American Art, vol. 23, no. 1, 2009, pp. 36–55. Lindley, R. (1967). The Gemini Programme from an Engineering Point of View. The Aeronautical Journal, 71(681), 623-635. Grimwood, James M., and Ivan D. Ertel. “Project Gemini.” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 3, 1968, pp. 393–418. Hoffman, S. (1966). Propulsion for Space Flight. The Aeronautical Journal, 70(670), 901-913 “Gemini 10 Goes Walking and Docking.” Science News, vol. 90, no. 5, 1966, pp. 71–71 (Same page also contains 'Stargazing Is Not Easy', fascinating report regarding effects of brightness on human vision in orbit.) Brulle, Robert V., and Gordon P. Cress. “Gemini Ejection Seat Development Challenge.” Air Power History, vol. 44, no. 4, 1997, pp. 50–61. Not sure how I missed it first time around but the high-res Germini Program gallery is up here: Although David Harland's book looks intriguing, Young and Colins' books and NASA's reports are probably more than enough as a combination to be going on with at the level required here. You don't have to search vary far through the academic archives to see the relatively minor role which history has assigned the Gemini missions compared to Apollo, despite the groundbreaking nature of what was achieved by the former in generating the experience necessary to feed the successes of the latter.

It's not often that you get to watch the recent past returned to life with such an informed eye. That interior detailing and weathering transcend notions of scale and you're left looking at a Sea King, not a model kit. Phenomenal.

Well done CC! That's quite the airshow you have there!

It is a saddening indictment of our age that you don't have to spend long on the internet before witnessing unpleasant behaviour: Of course you can't judge how people in the past treated their helicopters by our own standards today, but even so, I mean to say... Rather than portraying some vile beastliness of the human psyche however, this turned out to be an innocent piece of 16mm footage shot at - I think - A&AEE Boscombe Down in 1969, documenting icing trials on the Wasp's flotation gear: Image credit: IWM Having only ever seen stills of that mechanism in a deployed state thus far, footage of it actually working has been of great help in understanding the function of all the various parts around those clamshells. Good to see this young modeller getting in early to grab some reference shots too! You can see the full footage yourself over here in the IWM archive as part of a much larger and very toothsome collection of period footage showing various aircraft-related tests and trials of the time. The Wasp footage is on section 9 of the 22 clips available via that link. Visually-nourished by such matters I got to work on said clamshells over the weekend. With main Wasp design now taking up an awful lot of memory in Fusion, I decided to speed the worklow up by designing fittings like the floation gear and weapons loadout in a separate project so that things run faster. Once completed, such components can then be copied back into the main Wasp design. All great of course but having blocked out the main clamshell outline using @Anthony in NZ's superb slew of measurements and then blithely copying the working profile across into said main project in order to check for size, I got a nasty shock: M. Caine voice: 'Your only supposed to copy the bloody part across if you've scaled the measurments to 1/24th first!' Quite. Couldn't have put it better myself, &etc. etc. Betterer: In terms of detail and strength, I used a mixture of resin parts for the main body, with brass for the fittings to which supporting struts will eventually be attached: Producing the raised grid on both sides of the gear turned out to require a bit of lateral thinking and was probably the most time-consuming part of the process: After adding the air bottle I got stuck into the clamping mechanism with a clear sense from the film footage of how the parts I was looking at in the maintenance drawings actually operated, starting with the clamping levers which hold both sides of the container together: Extending out toward these clamps on either side are a pair of rocking levers, themselves being held in place by a locking clamp in centre: From then on it was a relatively straightforward job of attaching the solenoid valve to the airbottle and then doing up the wiring harness which connects the central terminal, clamp releases and solenoid: At this point a pause for a refreshing Top Deck was required: There's a wire missing from the back of the solenoid as you can see (the ones spoken of previously running from floation geat to '4-gang' plugboard on the engine deck) that will wait until this assembly has been attached to the Wasp later on: As it's critical that things like the mounting points for struts are positioned exactly on the clamshells, all parts attaching to it are designed with locating stubs: Flotation clamshell in finished state then: Et en Wasp: Going to stop now as the Space 1999 music has started up and it's all gone a bit Alan Carter... Tony PS. Delighted to get an email over the weekend from the Ulster Aviation Society with missile pylon mesurements from their Scout which I can put to use here. Thank-you Garry and Malc. 🤝

Hello all, I've not produced anything in this part of the forum before so feel a bit like a trespasser. As a first step in fulfilling a long-standing desire to produce my own version of a Gemini space capsule, I'm posting this placeholder to ensure that this is the next subject I do after my current Wasp build over in the aircraft section. That way there's no backing out.... 😁 The spacecraft in question will be the Gemini X mission flown by John Young & Michael Collins, July 18-21, 1966. As well as photography, the build will be based upon use of the following research materials: Carrying the Fire: Michael Collins, W.H.Allen 1970 Forever Young: A Life of Adventure in Air and Space: John Young & James Hansen, Univ. Press of Florida 2012 Gemini X Mission Report NASA 1966 Gemini X Notebook: Michael Collins 1966 Gemini Familiarization Manual Vols. 1-3 SEDR 300 NASA 1965 Transcript, Gemini X Voice Communications (Air-to-Ground, Ground-to-Air and On-Board) NASA 1966 Gemini X Mission Highlights NASA 1966 Project Gemini: Technology & Operations NASA SP-4002 1969 Gemini X Technical Debriefing Vols. 1-2 NASA 1966 On the Shoulders of Titans NASA SP-4002 1969 NASA SP-4203 1977 Gemini Operations Handbook: Spacecraft 10 Vols. 1-3 SEDR 300 NASA 1966 Gemini Technical Memorandum NASA 1966 Gemini X Final Flight Plan NASA 1966 Summary of Gemini Extravehicular Actvity NASA 1966 Interim Report, Manned Spaceflight Experiments, Gemini X NASA 1967 Of particular value in this reasearch and from which many of the above are drawn has been The Michael Collins Papers collection held at Virginia Tech. Michael Collins Papers, Ms1989-029, Special Collections, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Va. More in due course.... Tony

Morning all. A Friday update after the ritual reading of telegrams: Very kind Chris: I know it looks 'showy' putting rendered versions up like that from time-to-time but it's not until you see your designs in that form that you can really evaluate how good/bad/indifferent the drawings in Fusion will look like as physical objects. And also to give others a reasonable basis by which to critique your work by as well of course. One's enough from you pal.😁 Full disclosure guys - Bill reminded me during the week that I'd forgotton to add the sleeve to the rear portion of the main driveshaft so that is now in place: The collar and plate detailing on the original I'll provide as surface detail to the etch. 😁 Three letter code grouping repeated at intervals? Somewhere on the forum a sleeper agent steps away from his bench........ Cheers Keith. I always get confused between that emoji and the 'being sick' one and start to get paranoid I've done something really bad Terry! That'll do for me G - my thanks as always. Kind of you Ian. Bit much for a tattoo though you think? Cheers Colin. So, where are things at the end of another (here in Ireland morosely wet) week? Well, I haven't made very much progress on parts & inventory for the Wasp but paradoxically for positive reasons which will become apparent in due course. Aside from the driveshaft sleeve mentioned above, I also noticed I'd forgotten a rather prominent set of latches around the top of the hydraulic fluid reservoir, which are now present: A new addition to the starboard side of the deck is what for want of a better name I'd been thinking of as 'the 4-gang' - that horizontal row of sockets sitting directly to one side of the stbd ECU mounting: I wasn't actually that far off the mark with the name when having hunted down some of the part numbers in the maintenance manual , found they were: Flotation gear and cargo winch: makes sense when you think about it. More often than not though on airframes without flotation gear attached, this mounting doesn't have anything plugged in to yield any clues as to function. A number of Graeme Molineux's superb walkaround shots however show how those two rear connections have cables running prt & stbd to the flotation bag fittings - not for the first time his eye for summarizing and exposing visual detail helped me out on this build. At this point then I realized that the floation gear is going to have to be dealt with much earlier in the build than I'd intended due to the number of mounting points superimposed upon the sides of the engine deck, and which will interfere with surface detailing there if not attended to first. In fact it's not just flotation gear but also the mounting pylons for the AS.12 missiles that need to be taken into account in this region, as the kit will offer both whoosh and splash armament options. To catch out the unwary, the power sockets for the missiles toward the bottom of the fuselege are not in identical places on either side either.... Although I've loads of decent engineering drawings for the missile pylons themselves, I'm stymied by a lack of any measurements for them. Irrespective of differences regarding SS.11 and AS.12 missile loadouts between Scout and Wasp, as the inboard sections of the pylons bolted to the airframe are identical for both helicopters I've put in an enquiry to the Ulster Aviation Society to see if someone there could run a tape measure over the ones on their Scout in the hangar for me. Hopefully they can come through as the perspective in head-on shots like this is too misleading as the basis for an orthographic drawing. This is actually an upscaled still from the stirring 'Scout in Action' film by British Helicopters History . I've no such problems regarding floation gear though in being utterly blessed by the abundance of measurements and photos which @Anthony in NZ took for me previously: Not unrelated to detailing in this area is also the question of the undercarriage mounting points on the rear sponson. A while back somebody was selling one of these on Ebay: and yesterday whilst looking at a section of the test mule printed out back in January I realized mine stuck out too far: In fact way way too far! You can see by the anti-slip surfaces on the real thing how far the sponsons should protrude from the airframe as if you think about it ( and I hadn't until that point), with identical undercarriage components front and back the mounting points for front and rear undercariage legs have to lie flush with one another fore and aft. This wasn't a difficult matter to correct as it simply meant extending a guideline back from the front of the fuselage to then trim the sponson to match the front width: Short back and sides as it were... So after that rather rambling account, what is going to happen next? The big lozenge-shaped flotation bag things. These have to be built first so that the support pylons and struts are at the correct angles in space and attach to the rear fuselage in the right places. Only then can I finish off detailing that region. As a taste of things to come one of the nicest little films about the Wasp I've seen was published recently and very much worth your attention, not least of all for the sobering section at about the 3.30 mark of a Wasp ditching. https://youtu.be/1KM8uhS9nKE Excellent interviews too. Have a good weekend all of you. Tony

You'll never guess how the film opens... 😁 Only Fools and Horses completely ruined HMS Rodney for me...until I saw this: Image Credit: Simon's Scouse and all jokes page Gemini/Titan @ 1/24 = 154.3cm height. Exactly how big is your display case Terry? How on earth you found that film I don't know James (secret travelogue buff? ) : the cimematography was of such high quality that I felt compelled to do some digging around and surprisingly for a travel film of the period it was shot on 70mm (Superpanorama 70) stock. I can remember shorter and poorer quality versions of such films shown as B-features before the main movie in cinemas back in the 70s. Still aesthetically-scarred by one on Devon that was shown before - iirc - The Incredible Melting Man at the Granada in Kingston: possibly the only occasion on which an audience has booed a travel film... Good to know you're pleased with the results it gives. Ooh you lucky beggar Keith - I longed for that Action Man setup! RIP Major Tom: Today's update is by way of a benchmark in that the Waspertional Nimbus - along with all its associated fittings & fixtures - is now finished. Having plumbed in the fuel surge dampers earlier along with air supply for the inlet vane guide actuator, I have thankfully (all Gods be praised) at last run out of features which can be realistically expressed at 1/24th to build as physical entities. By way of a summary then, some renders of the completed Nimbus ensemble (basically antything that sits on or is attached to it in some way): Off to lie in a darkened room and gibber for a bit. Tony

Having received a detailed tour of a Sea King at Yeovilton from this gentleman, can confirm that he knows each rivet personally, if not by indeed by their first names... Looking forward to this immensely Crisp.

Egad! He's training it to jump through hoops on top of everything else. Oh my giddy gondolas!

What an exquisite Wasp!

The blend of personal history and technology involved here make this an utterly fascinating endeavour Ralph. The very best of luck with what I'm sure will be an exemplary build (helmets and all!)

Apologies for the breath today as ganetting on peppered mackerel for lunch. 😁 No roof = Irish solar panels. (Sunlight heats the bathwater directly!). Horror story is right Ian : regrettably it's not uncommon to find such domestic wreckage across the landscape here. Add in all the more modern 'ghost' houses and estates still unfinished after the banking crisis and it's no surprise that there's a housing crisis in this country. Criminal isn't the word. Thanks Terry - amendments to be unveiled in a moment.... 😄 That's why you never see a wasp eating a fish supper... Gotcha Pete. I'm the same after three mugs of coffee... Be prepared for lots of angsty pipe bending in due course Giorgio! 😄 😁 I suspect some kind of mental health exam will be mandatory for all who have followed this descent into the (detailed) maelstrom Noel! With the Wasp laying open its engineering in such a bare bones fashion Crisp, it has enough in common with sculpture for me to just about comprehend the physical features and functions involved. When it comes to the Lynx and onward to Wildcat though I suspect my technical graps would be rapidly exceeded. That said, producing a large-scale helicopter here has proven so fascinating/maddening/enlightening that I must confess a Sea King at similar scale has an equally large gravitational attraction to it as a future subject... I'm growing rapidly less comfortable at using 'traditional' resins for printing tbh Pete and am going to trial one of the plant-based water-washable ones soon. Or as you suggest, get a chocolate printer even... https://cocoapress.com/pages/gallery *Entering the Westland archive of a morning... 😁 3d-printed brownie points to anyone who can name the film this still is from! Is that why he has all those <stage-cough> *rivets* on his Defiant? Ralph that is enormously kind of you and please expect a slew of 'likes' to show up on some of your other threads in due course (Lynx included). You've built so many of the subjects that interest me. Am in full scale-sympathy with you! 😁 I suspect The Cognitive Psychology of Helicopter Structures to be one ofthe great unwritten volumes of literature... A Hecla in the audience. Empathy for the Devil. James I think it's pretty safe to say that my obsession with the Gemini missions makes this a certainty. Have you read Mike Collins? Of all that NASA cohort he remains the most human and original of them all at trying to express the extraordinary (experiences); this copy has been in my bookshelves since I was 15.... When I do a capsule it will have to be Gemini X, Young & Collins' mission: On the contrary James - an invaluable set of images to add to the reference mosaics. Thank you!, Oblique progress to report today, as with a build of this extent, I'm having to painfully and incrementally learn a new magnitude of organizational skills in order to keep track of everything. In this respect you find that you are fighting your own instincts to just plough on with the addictive iteration of parts but instead, have to force yourself to stop and begin to inventory what you already have, remembering the small decisions that can get lost in the overall gestalt of the thing, and so forth. The cloud account now has several growing folders of existing parts that need to be inventoried to check that they contain the latest versions, alongside which I've been having to go through each design section to pluck out the brass components to begin the process of turning those folded parts back into planar designs for the PE plates. This is a (false-scale, oversize) contact sheeT of where I'm at so far in that particular task: Exporting PE designs is something Fusion frankly stinks at, whereby you have to export each PE design as a .dxf file and then spend ages cleaning up things like line-weight and fill colour in Illustrator (or any other vector graphic program that can handles this filetype) - grossly time-consuming. At present these tidied up drawings all reside as separate .ai files, later they'll be gathered together on one sheet for design of the photoetch plate. When the time comes I think I'll talk to PPD over in Argyle about them handling the etching as they did such a superb finish on the Sea Vixen stuff last time around. I think I mentioned in the last update also that there were a couple of features on the hydraulic system that I wanted to revisit so these were attended to around the etch stuff. First up there's now a printed pressure gauge on the side plate next to the accumulator: The dial will have a decal (oh God I'd forgotten I'd need to do decals to...) and can then be glassed in. I left the holes for the mounting screws of the gauge open as it wasn't possible to add a 3d printed part for them alone - these can be added from scrap brass of platic rod easily enough during assembly. Also addressed was a redesign for the hydraulic fluid reservoir in order that the sight level gauge for the fluid have a reasonable physical expression: Yes I know it looks like Trevor the Talking Toilet Cistern chatting to his friends the pipes but the optimistic idea here is to whack a bit of white plasticard over that circular opening on the interior, drip a little hydraulicky-looking fluid onto it (enough to fill the window up about 4/5 of the way when vertical) and then glass it in with a bit of transparency on the outside to produce this kind of visual: It's either that or fill the whole bluidy tank and ah'm no made of money... Net result of those two amendments is then hopefully something which gives a more complete expression to that region: Digging around behind the cushions looking for stuff that's fallen down the back of the Internet recently I happened across a French film from 1965 - Le ciel sur la tête (Skies Above) - and have to say it is pretty excellent of its kind. Being filmed almost entirely on the Clemenceau it's chock full of period detail regarding Etendard and Alize carrier operations that will be of interest to many on here, but in addition has a gripping psychological plotline that makes it worth watching as a film in its own right. Think Ice Station Zebra / The Bedford Incident but with Gauloise and proper dining facilities. There's a trailer for it here: Anyway, if you haven't seen it and French naval aviation is your thing, worth tracking down. Thanks for looking in and hope you all have a good end to your respective weeks. Tony

Congratulations Heather. A splendid piece of work.

It looks a lot cleaner than my Skoda's windscreen if that's any comfort! Don't know if it helps in anyway Bill (apart from the usual top-notch cutaway drawing) but I've left a copy of the original 1957 Wessex article from Flight magazine up here.

Can confirm not dissapointed. 😁 (And if possible looks like some of your best yet Ian. ) My apologies for not noticing this thread sooner!

A delightful catchup on the last several updates Bill and this: is what in a restaurant would be up on the board as the chef's special. Exquisite.

Looking forward to the app being available on Android and iOS too! Like Tinder but for people with Zeppelins...

Sincerely hoping it's aircraft-related and nothing to do with nasal hair removal Terry... Jocularity aside, a real pleasure to see such a fine series of etch pieces emerging from your bench, amongst other engrossing processes. Lovely stuff. Most grateful for that info on lead wire too - I didn't know that particular company existed and see some in my future.

Icebergs, rivets and mottling. Not sure I'd trust them as a firm of lawyers but a characteristically rich couple of updates from your good self Steve. As G. says: Continued best of luck with the next phase.

That looks great Heather. Fingers crossed for you the masks come off ok - always the bit in painting that gives me the most discomfort (and corersponding pleasure when it's fine!)

Good evetermorn all. In peak irony last week I got stung simultaneously by several wasps. Clearing out nettles in the front garden I didn't notice the opening of their nest in the mound in front of me until the contents emerged in a squadron scramble. Before you could utter 'Oh dear, this is quite unfortunate' (or words to that effect) they'd lashed a few barbs into the Baronial carcass. I was brave though and didn't cry, whilst Mrs. B dressed the wounds with vinegar. Nearly as painful as trying to work out the hydraulic system on a big Wasp, of which more in a moment after we draw the curtains and link hands in the gloom to see if the spirits are with us: 🤣 'At my signal - unleash Hell Bod!' I reckon by late summer Pete: there a currently so many parts for print or PE that I seriously run the risk of losing track if an inventory isn't organized soon. It makes sense to do so once the engine deck and rear fuselage are completed, by which stage I calculate this should be between 50-60% of the design work completed. Do you reckon if I play an airbrush on the rotors at the right angle it might produce enough lift to raise a wheel off the ground Terry?😀 It's a bit lof an archaeological dig isn't it Bill? You find yourself uncovering layers of the past in terms of how somebody imagined a thing and then built it. Our objects travel forward in time without us for others to decipher. Thank you as always Giorgio. You were in my thoughts yesterday reading about the dire Italy/Sicily/Sardinia heat levels: most sincerely hope yourself and family are doing ok. Sonorously put Pete. Bit of a literary cove yourself there, doncha know. Isn't it? And I agree Ian. Vivid picture of you coolly leafing through an Arabic phrase book whilst the pupil flies the aircraft inverted through a thundercloud.... 😁 Thanks Alan - so am I! 😁 Kind of you as always Chris. Colin - in relation to the above, have you read Richard Sennet's The Craftsman? It's a fascinating study of the way and why of making things. For not dissimilar reasons I follow Marlène Aviation over on (what's left after Musk's tantrums) of Twitter: the sheer brio of French aircraft design has been a revelation to me. Also, what's not to like about an aircraft that looks like an Arado Ar234 trying to mate with a Hampden whilst it's trying on a pair of clogs: Image credit: Marlène Aviation Anyway. Hydraulics. Why does that word always make me laugh? Prossibly because of its Milliganesque rhyming properties. Either way this is the destination of today's update, that steampunk Tower of Medusa squatting to port of the main gearbox: (The gauge on my one will go up to 21 of course.) As on so many occasions with this helicopter, the maxim 'it looks simple enough until you try to reproduce it' applied in spades here, a quick working drawing being required to synthesize the view from all angles in order to comprehend the key features: My early assumptions of this being a solid structure with just a few projecting features to worry about were rapidly demolished by finding it to consist essentially of a sheet metal carcase adorned with an absolute V&A of fittings and pipework. Taken en masse, the level of detail required at 1/24th is routinely overwhelming so in this situation (as in so many others on this project) the most effective way of banishing fear was simply to start from the bottom and work up gradually in terms of complexity - in this case, integrating the base as surface detail onto the engine deck: The addition of those mounting slots then allows the interlocking parts of the metal base to be accurately set in place: The detailing for the pressure gauge (Mk.14 H) on the outer face of that feature I've currently drawn up as an embossed surface detail on the PE, though I may revisit this decision and turn the dial into a printed part. Tucked in the front of this is the cylindrical form of the accumulator: - whilst on top sits the reservoir for the hydraulic fluid, complete with sight gauge on the rear face: As that tank will be printed hollow, in theory you could stick a transparent panel on the sight gauge and have it actually filled with fluid @Terry1954... With the two main components in place as a sort of visual boundary marker (for alignment & scale in relation to the surrounding features of the region) you then have a reasonable basis to begin adding smaller features to the inboard: - and outboard faces of the array: At this point in proceedings it begins to dawn just how many pipes and hoses are going to be involved in the next step. Again, when intimidated by number, just start adding one at a time and let the total take care of itself in due course: As in previous instances, I''m using 0.3mmØ as the minimum practicable diameter to build things like hoses later from using jewllery wire and a bending rig. That Ankh-like hoop should ceretainly be fun to get right... The bulk of the hoses are accounted for in fact by the three cyclic control servos added in the last update: Over to starboard was a deck feature which I hadn't noticed until now - a mounting bracket set into the deck at an angle to hold the hoses at the correct height and angle so they thread through the structures beneath the MRGB: That whole network is driven by this hydraulic pump on the bottom port side of the MRGB pyramid: T. L. Ciastula's seminal 1964 article - The Development of the P.531 - contains an outstanding description of how this pump draws power from the main drive shaft via interlocking gears in terms that even this layperson can understand. To finish then, some synoptic views of the whole maze of hoses in terms of how they intermingle with the surrounding features of the Wasp: Aside from a couple of runs of oil pipe along the port side of the Nimbus (to do with those saucer-like surge fittings mounted above the oil cooler) that really should be just about it now for Nimbus detailing. I see from the Flickr timeline that it's been about 3 months now since this phase of the work started. The remaining tasks to complete in this region are things rivets, sockets etc. around the rear fuselage; time-consuming rather than complicated, and with less scope for being ambushed by hidden detail! In contrast to the furnace in other parts of Europe, its Atlantic edge here is typically howling wind and rain at present, rather summed up by this photo I caught during the week: Thanks - as always - for looking in. I hope your own works are going well. More anon. Tony

Fret not Daddy M, you'll be grand (and have the goodwill of all of us behind you).

Much appreciate you posting this information as it deals with a problem I'm no stranger to either: I've used a similar process on long thin items like rotor blades. @Serkan Sen on this forum has developed his own strategy to great effect on his own builds as well that are worth seeking out.