TheBaron

I think you've surpassed even you're own preternaturally-high standard of paint finish with the work seen here Steve. I'm just astounded by the richness and presence of it. Congratulations.

Pristine Neil, just a pristine piece of work that's a pleasure to see.

Splendid piece of work CJ.

Superb rendering of the subject Chris. Well done indeed.

Two weeks later: I can't believe I haven't either! Cracking combination of techniques overlaid with your usual top-tier paint work Ian. Glad to se the new printer is working out so well for you too. Lovely progress.

Dizzy with deja vu looking at some of they parts Bill! 😄 Splendid work all round.

Love that shot in particular Chris - a wonderfully sharp looking piece of work in that view. Well done!

Kiss of the Spider Woman Arms Good evening, and hoping this finds all well with all of ye here. Contrary to appearances, around other life matters work has in fact been continuing on the Wasp over the last month or so, however, as much of it has involved materials research and some consequent rethinking of design ideas, I didn't want to post anything until there were concrete results to present to such a knowledgable audience. On to all that after some (grossly) overdue replies to the mail: Most gracious of you as always James. Is it possible that 'Awe' might be a Belgian beer CC? 😁 (Thanks my friend.) Thanks as always CJ - we're getting there (slowly). 😄 Bill, you're like a little scale-devil on my shoulder. At some point I might shrink down an MRGB out of curiosity but a lot of detail would begin to fail long before it got to the 1/72 level. At 1/32 some items like servo rods are already borderline... Thanks G, but there were still several tweaks needed to satisfy me of pulling the maximum quality from the printer. Most generous of you Colin: thanks! That radioactive blue is indeed the native colour of that stuff, however it does come in a number of flavours. I'd never worked with such a translucent resin before and discovered during test prints for the rotor hub/pillar assembly that it suffers from a fatal 'blooming' issue when it comes to negative spaces inside of shapes. At least long narrow ones! In the shot below you can see how the channels for the blade extension mounting pins penetrate right inside the hub for a secure 'grip'; the problem with this light-blue resin however is that it seems to scatter light inside the structure to such a degree that it continues to cure any liquid resin left inside these channels, almost completely blocking them: Taking into account the droop function it was a tough job and time-consuming job re-drilling these by hand - certainly not something I'd be prepared to pass onto others in kit form. Having also found that - with much more in the way of subtle surface details than the undercarriage legs - such 'blooming' effaced visual features on the hub to an unacceptable degree, I readily abandoned the blue for an alternative (and thankfully successful) solution to these issues, as detailed below. Mike you dear old soul, thank-you. I must get over to see how you've been getting on with Pete's Land Rover! Steady-on Terry. I don't want to be responsible for any dental bills... Decent of you Pete: I may have another small bag of parts for you at the end of all this if you feel a deep-space freighter coming on.... 😁 Kind of you Ian - how have you been gettting on yourself with the Siraya stuff you mentioned a while back? Cheers Alan: I can't surely be the only one who goes 'Great! Now I can just print them bits out!' and then finds a whole new series of problems to overcome in the support and printing process - can I? 🤖 Dear heart, thank-you. Nice one Serkan - I hope it's been going well for you at both scales my friend! Pete, thank-you - I enjoyed that enormously. Matters as they stand then. By September I'd come to realize that this project had snowballed to such a significant degree that some form of management plan was necessary in order to simply stay on top of everything at both scales as a one-person operation, so began organizing prints thematically in VDT - partly so that I wouldn't forget what many of them were later on! In terms of the engine itself, you can see that I've not only broken the Nimbus down into four main components, but thanks to the greater freedom which the support systems in VDT have given me now, have been able to integrate a lot of smaller features like the heat exchange and fuel control units into the printed sections in a manner which I hadn't found possible with other packages previously. This isn't simply in terms of facility but also in speed - as a single person I needed a much more efficient workflow when it came to readily designing support structures for so many different types of objects and shapes. Another motivating factor behind including more of these smaller features into larger printed sections resulted from the experimentation with materials and processes which I'd engaged in over the last month or so. This has allowed me to economize on the numbers of parts required - specifically PE, which were beginning to run out of control - and, by adopting different types of resin for different jobs, approach the idea of printability with increased scope and quality. In terms of design strategy, with the projected use of brass PE here involving metal sheet of between 0.15 - 0.2mm thickness, an increase in the thickness of certain flat brass features by only 0.1mm permits them to be printed in resin as part of larger units without unduly impacting visual fidelity at either scale. This eliminates the need to use so much etch down to what were in some cases likely to be unbuildably-small elements. Up until recently I'd also been conservative/lazy enough to continue printing with Elegoo's standard grey resin simply because it was reliable and generally gave good results. With the higher level of detail involved in the Wasp however I felt that the Saturn 2 could be pushed further farther in terms of output quality and so for smaller parts, began tests with Elgoo's 8k resin. Very late to that particular party and much as many people online had reported, not necessarily an easy resin to work with. In fact it was by far the finickiest resin I've ever worked with in just trying to get even half of my prints to stick to the build plate! Over a frustrating fortnight of print tests I finally homed in on its main issues (at least in terms of the Saturn 2): needs much slower lifts speeds than usual, doesn't like temperature variation, and the build plate must be levelled as flush to the printer as you can possibly go without actually driving it through the glass. Since then I haven't had a single failure but paid for it in blood & resin I can tell you. Over the last fortnight then I've been reprinting the Nimbus and all of the smaller parts of the Wasp in 8K resin at both scales: In terms of print quality, these are the quite simply the sharpest prints I've ever gotten from the Saturn 2 (here using a 0.3mm layer height): (none of the parts have been cleaned up yet so please avert your gaze from the stumps of any suports which are curently visible) Some features which had previously been intended as PE like that big mounting bracket on the side of the engine for the heat exchange unit you can see present here at both scales in resin without compromise to appearances: Similarly with that blade-like control linkage for the engine governor, integrated now in a resin form more amenable in construction terms than trying to slip a slither of brass in between already narrow resin parts: Sor far nothing which printed at 1/24 has failed to reproduce at 1/32 - which has been pleasantly surprising. Even features like the tiny rubber collars for the snubber struts, which I didn't necessarily think would work at 1/32, but (gratifyingly) have: Some of the bigger electrical and air pipes have also come out well at both scales: I am definitely now a converted skeptic when it comes to the use of 8k resins; from thinking the increase a cosmetic one resulting from way that light falls on a darker looking printed object, in the flesh I can see an observable improvement in the sharpness of the print. I've read several varying explanations as to why this might be (as well as some intemperate dismissals of it being the case at all!) but overall feel that those related to the diminution of light-scattering in a medium at the printing stage provide the most compelling rationale for increased acuity. Again here on the rear wall of the cabin I've been able to incorporate what would have been PE detailing into the resin print: The flotation clamshells have also been redone in 8K resin: Similarly you can see how by adding 0.1mm to the thickness of the the smallest sets of brass ribs at either end of the clamshell, the need for miniscule wafers of PE has now been superseded by the quaslity of the resin reproduction(as well as allowing the fragile clamshell clamps to be integrated elements as, although they printed happily as standalones, the 1/32 version was a mere weasel's whisker of a thing that would break in an instant. The only bits on these now requiring PE are the perimeters of those rounded ends of the clamshell, which couldn't be printed simply due to the presence of the supports structure needed for printing: For larger components like the combined boom/deck, standard Elegoo resin remains absolutely fine as smoothness rather than detail are the order of the day here. At both scales these parts have also been re-printed to incorporate more features from the electrical system into the surface of the engine deck. As these latter elements are for the most part variations upon the rubberized collar, they wouldn't really benefit from any sharper reproduction at this level: Down at the tiny end of the parts-spectrum, the 'teeth' inside of the rear rotor driveshaft remain present at both scales, whereas previously in the standard resin, they disappeared at 1/32: Likewise the tail rotor assembly has all of its features crisply defined: In my reply to Colin above I mentioned having solved the 'bloomin' blue resin' effect with regard to the rotor hub. I really liked the material strength of the eSun hard-tough resin so discovering that they did a more opaque 'Ab-black' version with identical physical properties, I redid the hub/pillar in that and the resulting prints were excellent: After tinkering around as well to find that I could actually reduce the exposure times on the Saturn 2 lower than those recdommended by the manufacturer, the resulting level of detail with the black version is devoid of any blooming and equal in terms of quality to anything you'd get with a standard resin. One thing you find when it's emerging from the vat though: - is they should have called it 'Harkonnen Black'.... The undercarriage was also revisited in this flavour of Hard Tough to pleasing effect: The strength of this resin then got me thinking about printing other parts in it that would have been too fragile in standard resin alone, such as the compensator flyweights which hang down under the rotor hub: The 1/32 versions of those are 0.22mm thick and yet strong enough to be a practicable part to handle during assembly. For similar reasons I printed the lower elbows and collars of the spider arms using the same stuff: With the now redundant 'bloomin' blue' rotor hubs to use as a test-mule, this latter piece of experimentation was the last remaining piece in the puzzle allowing me to produce functional pitch control for blade-folding, with the pip-pins out, as it were: This is just a rough mockup as proof of principle of course; the important point is that it demonstrates the way that incorporating an aluminium blade fork/extension/pitch change arm assembly with the hard resin spider elbows provides sufficient strength to let you faithfully reproduce the telescoping push-pull rods of the original as a working mechanism: The rotor blades can then be spread for take-off or folded back and cradled as often as display duties require (or just every Trafalgar Day): This works pretty much how I envisaged it would at 1/24, but it was still a nice filip to pull off the same trick at 1/32 too: The relative lengths of those push-pull rods need adjusting for accuracy of course and the lower one will look better in nickel silver to ape the original: other than that though we have a robust working rotor pitch for folding/spreading at both scales now: Aluminium fork/extension/pitch change arms at both scales also means no compromise on strength for either version: Thanks for looking in and apologies for the length of the post but as all those issues and results were interconnected, it made more sense to post them as a coherent whole rather than referring you back and forth over a series of posts. I'll shut up now and leave you with a faint red auroral streamer shooting up through the Hyades and Pleiades as Jupiter looks on: Salut! Tony

You don't say which version of the software you're using but on the paid one if you want to combine auto and manual supports, simply generate whatever type of auto-supports you initially want on your model and then from the same window just proceed to add the manual supports of your choice by clicking the 'manual' button in bottom left: After that you can then edit any support at either the tip or node level, again by going back into manual mode. Worth watching Voxeldance's tutorial channel to familiarize yourself with the software due to the clarity/rigour of the explanations they provide.

Bashed and greebled to the satisfaction of this onlooker. I hear the BBC Radiophonic Workshop just looking at them!

Enviable precision of looks Bill. Congratulations on another state-of-the-art statement. 👏

We need to start a sweepstake. I'll have a fiver on Tweed thong, peephole weskit, and a brass ear trumpet* *Not worn in ear.

Ah P, your work exudes calmness and poise. How wonderful.

I haven't seen any discussion on BM about Voxeldance's Tango slicing software so far but as I noticed that a cutdown version of it (minus I believe the fancy supports) now ships with Elegoo's new Mars 4, I thought I'd add a quick review - either for anyone encountering this software for the first time or indeed those wondering if the paid version is worth it. As this review is based upon the paid version and I currently print on a Saturn 2, please bear that in mind when reading the following commentary - experiences with different printers will always vary! The first thing to say as a longtime user of Lychee and sometimes Chitubox (which have more in common than they differ in many of the basics) is that Voxeldance seem to have started with the express intention of creating a workspace significantly different from their competitors. That's not always a positive factor in software design of course, but in this case they have I feel succeeded in evolving a 'next level' user experience, one with far more nuanced and responsive approaches to the task of supporting and slicing models for print. Interface Look, feel and operation are crisp and responsive - quite refreshingly it feels like you are in a screen environment where the designers have concentrated on letting the workflow, well, flow! Perhaps an odd thing to say about a piece of software but the interface feels more clean and spacious throughout than other slicing software I've used. There are two workspaces which you can easily flip between from the top of the screen - 'Preparing', where all the various preparations for hollowing, orienting and supporting take place, and 'Slicing', which simply handles anti-aliasing and sliced exports: Screen/mouse opererations are smooth and responsive across both workspaces, as well as seamlessly integrating with 3D Connexions Spacemouse - something neither Lychee or CTB do well, if at all. Setup Creating your project uses the familiar start-point of picking your printer from a list (currently there are about 30+ maunfacturers listed - a number of which I've not encountered before) and then customising the profile for the resin you're using: After positioning, orienting, hollowing etc., it's then on to: Supporting This aspect of the software quite blew me away when I realized what it was doing. Eschewing the basic tip/pillar/raft paradigm, Voxeldance have done two innovative things here which single Tango out - creating different families of supports suited to different subjects, allied to some quite sophisticated algorithms which generate connective lattices. In terms of the supports the various families are known as: 'Bar', 'Tree', Smart', 'Dragon' and 'Raft', each with different versions of themselves at multiple scales: Judging by the names of many of the support families, it's clear that VDT already has a significant following in the Gundam and figure printing community. It's a simple process to modify these support parameters in order to create support scripts personalized to your own type(s) of work. A nice feature in this regard is that rather than trying to cram all the parameters into a single window, Voxeldance scale the information across the main panel and a subsidiary 'More Settings' window so that you don't get swamped with too much data in a single place. You'll also notice in the above screenshot that by default, the 'Support' window opens in 'Auto-Support' mode. Normally 'auto' anything I avoid like the plague ( particularly auto-supports in slicing software!) but in this instance it works well, quite unbelievably well in fact. If you prefer to use the manual function instead (which I tend to due to the rather complicated nature of some of the parts I work with at present) you just click on the 'manual' button in the bottom left of the 'Supports' window and you're free add what ever supports you want from scratch. You can also mix support types in full auto mode or mix auto and manual together. Addditionally you can go back and edit any individual support or combinations of support in detail at any stage. I particularly like how the 'Tree' support type lets you grow extra branches from a central core without the need for a whole forest of pilllars. Where VDT score hands down over its competitors is in the supporting lattices which are generated automatically to produce a stable 'cradle' for your object. This enables you to use more supports with smaller tip sizes and thereby reduce surface damage to the object. Additionally, these 'nets' of supports are usually quite easy to tear off by hand before curing. These lattices will vary according to the support type you are using and again are fully adjustable/editable. Another nice touch here are the perforated rafts and customisable extents allowing you to save on resin and increasing ease of removal from the build plate after printing. Outputs The usual twin options of exporting a sliced project for print or exporting your supported work in an 3d object format for selling are present: Notice that the only slice-export format supported for Elgoo printers is the newer open source .goo container so with my Saturn 2 I had to export in the .vdt format and use UV Tools to convert to that ghastly proprietary .ctb format (which Elgoo have now thankfully found the sense to abandon). Object export has all the usual suspects: Anti-aliasing in the 'Slicing' part of the interface contains the usual AA/GL/IB parameters. Annoyingly for me there's a bug for the Saturn 2 profile in the curent version of VDT that sets the AA flag to 8 no matter what I set it to. One of the nice things about Tango though is that the Voxeldance support staff are very active on Discord and I was chatting with one of their tech guys last evening who assures me this problem will be fixed in the next upgrade. Learning curve Despite the more sophisticated environment, if you've 'grown-up' in 3d printing with the likes of Chitubox and Lychee (as I have) then it's just a case of translating your existing skills into a new workspace. It took me a couple of days at most to adjust, and that included learning the new support paradigms. Conclusion After working with it for the last fortnight I've ditched all my other slicer software subscriptions and now solely use the paid version of VDT for print preparation - I found it to be that much better than what I could do previously in the same amount of time. There's no merit however in a conclusion which assumes all users to be identical and that therefore a single verdict is the only permisible one. Tango does in my view have an interface and some unique aspects to its workflows which render it superior to the likes of Lychee and Chitubox but in the end, the kind of user you are should decide whether that is enough of a factor for you to change - which is as it should be, especially where money is changing hands. Probably the clearest way to state the case is that if your work routinely involves complex and/or a wide range of different parts, or you need to produce parts in volume, then VDT provides a deeper and more flexible toolset (at this price level). If however you only need to produce the odd part for you own work and are already happy with Lychee or Chitubox, well there's considerably less reason to change your methodology just for the sake of it. Anway, given that some BMers may be encountering this software with their new printer (looking at you @Brandy 😁) I thought this of interest. Tony

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.