TheBaron

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....

Addenda: in posting the above shots I noticed an error in my placement of the stbd power sockets for the missile system. Previously I had them too low and too and too far right. They should be like this in being closer to the door sill and with the fixing plate straddling the junction between cabin and rear fuselage:

That's not a Wasp - this is a wasp! A Giant Woodwasp, or to be more exact, Urocerus gigas. Isn't she extraordinary? At 50mm in length ovipositor to antennae nearly the size of a 1/72 Westland job.... Not sure what it says about our relationship but Mrs. B found this sadly expired female out by the front door step during the week and duly presented it to me with a Morticia Addams-like murmur of: 'I brought you a murder-hornet'. What a sensor suite: Although they're actually harmless, this quote about them from The Wildlife Trust sounds like the plot of a Guy N. Smith novel: 'However, the length of time the larvae spend in wood does result in the adults sometimes emerging from harvested timber used for building or even furniture.' AKA: 'The Moonbase COD' I feel socially-useful at last Pete! - aaaand now back to being a blot on society again. It was a nice trip while it lasted. Thanks Terry. There's some nice interview material here with David Gibbings & Tony Ellerbeck speaking about the relationship of the Wasp to seawater and the way in which the floation gear tried to act as marriage counsellor... Was it as many as mine Bill! 😆 Only on my third attempt at 'the lattice' did I realize I'd got one too many horizontal dividers! Surprised bits of the Wasp never ended up on the Nostromo to be quite honest: Maybe I can flog them some 1/24th widgets for Alien V ? 😁 Nearly a fortnight since the last update and one of those mildly-depressing situations where it feels like you've done a lot, but in it consisting of lots of small details the cumulative results aren't necessarily as apparent as the more dramatic flourishes which larger features produce. Anyway, for what it's worth (and in semi-chronological sequence) here's where things have gotten to. Although I've begun to build up a parts inventory in .stl format in order to begin printing the rear half of the Wasp, large sections like tail boom and engine deck still can't be printed yet due to the way in which certain features (floatation gear, undercarriage, underside detail and mounting points) straddle rear and front sections sections of the airframe and therefore require their respective mounting points on the fuselage to be precisely aligned. The first step in addressing these matters then was to complete work on the flotation gear, an apparently straightforward process with its major features easily visible in photograph which rapidly deteriorated into a game of three-dimensional chess whereby the front and rear sets of support struts for the clamshell are identical, yet attach to two very different parts of the airframe (in terms of shape and contour) whilst simultaeously in a precise set of spatial alignments to both clamshells and MRGB. It will not surprise regular readers of this collumn that it was only on the cusp of starting to work on this set of features that the full complexity of these constraints became apparent. Not for the first time I began to speculate that aircraft design historically has much in common with the kind of sacred geometries which the likes of Peter Ackroyd, Ian Sinclair and Alan Moore have explored in their work: Boiled down into the mundane realm then you have to end up with something like this: Although the two sets of vertical struts are as I mentioned identical, in terms of a buildable model kit I had to modify the front set so that their lower ends mount directly into the jury frame at the correct angle: The rear set are largely faithful to the real thing in terms of a PE mounting bracket, into which the 0.8mm brass tube of the struts will slot and be locked into place with a 0.3mm pin. In order to facilitate this, the bottom ends of the tubing will be crimped flat in parallel pliers and a 0.3mm hole drilled for the locking pin: Front sets as I say mount into locating holes in the jury frame, each side of which will in turn be mounted onto the side of the cabin via a couple of 0.8mm brass locating pins: In this way the mounting of the jury frame to the aircraft remains pretty much faithful to the original. In counterpoint to all this was the bit of creative thinking needed for the attachment of the struts to the clamshell doors: I wanted to avoid false or oversize elements for this so by having the topside mounting points printed as part of the clamshell and using 0.5mm tubing inside the 0.8mm struts, was able to arrive at what I hope is a happy compromise between structural strength and visual fidelity. Quite how this will work on the 1/32nd version I'll leave to the challenge of a future day.... The last stage of this particualr job required a diagonal strut leading back midway along the engine deck, and a companion angling in across the deck and attching to the collar of the MRGB: I initially thought I'd messed-up the alignments for that diagonal strut which attaches to the side of the engine deck (on account of it not meeting flush with the contour of the fuselage) as from side-on photos alone it's not at all apparent that it shackles onto a small pyramidal bracket as seen above. Mercifully a few acute-angle ones looking forward saved blushes/oaths. As to the other strut running perpendicularly across to the MRGB, as is typical of modelling it only dawns at you right at the end that suddenly the very last bit which you're adding to an assembly might suddenly throw the rest of it out of whack if it's wrong. Was I worried? Yes, absolutely bricking it for I knew @Anthony in NZs measurements of the floation gear were a sfirm bedrock so if MRGB and floation gear didn't agree, then I'd made a monumental spheres-up of the whole arrangement. The Gods sometimes smile even upon the unworthy however: 3° nudge on the vertical, 0.2° on the horizontal angle and it slotted precisely. As with the upper struts on the clamshells, a run of 0.5mm tubing inside the 0.8mm outer allows the struts to be firmly mounted in holes into the sides of the gerarbox: That needed a few days to recover from, which, coincidentally, was the amount of time it took to ponder the fittings for the AS.12 pylons. Having accurate measurements for the inner sections of these meant being able to concentrate on the fitting points themselves without distraction: in connection with which at some point in the past I'd added the rear shackle point as a 3d printed part without realizing its function. This time around it was deleted and promptly replaced by some PE components front and rear for strength: I forgot to do an X-ray version of that image but each of those bits of brass extends back into slots in the the fuselage by about a mill. or so in order that they don't drop off when loaded. The top front one I redesigned so that it's beefed-up and easier to solder the parts accurately together prior to attaching to the side of the deck: Power connections for the missile system were also added at this time, the actual sockets themselves to be bits of brass tubing. Ignore the horizontal bar between the pylon mounting brackets; that's just there to make sure the holes line up at either end: Starboard set of sockets, which is not in the corersponding place on that side: I've no idea why it shouldn't be in the same position as the one to port except of course for that recessed access panel which I've similarly no clue as to why it's there. The only features inside the airframe at that point you might want to access are either to do with the autopilot servos or fuel tanks. I'm clueless... From then on in I decided to just complete detailing the sides of the rear fuselage with rivets before realizing that: a) I'd have to take into account the fairing around the undercarriage sponson and: b) that would also involve taking into account surface details and mounting points on the outer face of said sponson. Ever get the feeling that one detail just leads remoreslessly to another? It's as bad as the bloody universe... That sponson fairing. By a long chalk this proved to be the most complex shape I'ver ever had to model in Fusion on account of it being five different sets of compound curves which all have to agree with each other in spacetime: Often I'd get one of the shapes right in space, just not at the same time as all the others. And so on, ad infinitum. Eventually it succumbed shortly before I was about to and then it was possible to get on with adding a few rivets to the sponson, whereupon they multiplied and spread beyond numbering around the sides of the engine deck: Next steps? Terra partially-cognita: @bootneck - along with Anthony's imagery, your underside shots will be off immense value in the next set of tasks - Which are: adding the mounting points fore and aft for the undercarriage and oleo legs in order that they align corectkly at either end of the Wasp, and then pretty much as the case with the floatation gear, focus on building the undercarriage itself. There's no point going on to print any of the larger bits yet until 100% sure the smaller bits all stick into and onto it in the all right places and at the right angles. Just off for a glass of Lambrini in my Cessna headsquare... Bless all here & etc. Tony

Jerzy - what a delight. Your choice of subject and supporting research never fail to inspire.

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