Photon

Some progress this weekend after not working on this for a couple months... I cut out and glued up the wall sections that will make up each side of the room. I designed a simple frame to support the wall sections at 45 deg. the backside: I found a decent picture of the Airlock set that showed some details that are hard to see in the film. I'll try to bring some of these details into my model, specifically the row of vents above the padding and the 6 cylindrical shapes behind the racks. I had some 1:72 wheel hubs from the Zvezda Ballistic Missile Launcher Topol kit on hand that are pretty close. I printed the vent structures and glued in some styrene spacers. I didn't sand these and will let the layer lines provide a bit of 'vent-like' detail. Hopefully it won't look too crappy. Here is one wall section completely clad. thanks for stopping by.

I'm not sure what the dimensions of the set were, but If I had to guess, I'd says my model is about 1:15 scale

Thanks everybody. I really appreciate the encouragement. So, I've been been running my 3D printer solidly, turning out all the "padded bits". I've got the ones that surround the doors pretty much done. These were printed in polystyrene, as I typically do. A bit warmer today ( -1° C), so I sprayed some primer on them, then ran in the house and hit them with the hair dryer. Here they are arranged on a 1:1 CAD drawing: Something that's been troubling me is how I'm going to bend up the tubular racks seen on both walls. I made up a couple of jigs and tried my first one today. It's not perfect, but I think the technique has promise. The aluminum block in the center is fixed in place by a couple of screws through the bottom of the plate. The 1/8" rod is held against the block with one of the clamps, then heated locally with a heat gun and bent. The next clamp holds it place and you repeat for the next one, working around the block. The two ends overlap each other. I remove it from the block and cut the overlapping ends flush with a razor blade. The groove in the top of the block is used to align the two ends while gluing. To get the two 45° bends, I use a second fixture. This is made from a piece of MDF. There is a stop at one end to align the frame to. and then clamped with a small piece of aluminum. The nuts in the MDF were pressed into a slightly smaller hole with my vice and secured with a little cyanoacrylate. I heat the rod again locally with the heat gun and bend over the form and install the next clamp. The last side is heated and bent but held by hand while it cools. The picture below will help: For the legs of the tubular racks, I made a jig that will allow me to drill a 1/8 hole exactly in the middle of the rod. Here's a test piece: That's it for now. Thanks for looking in. Peter

Fantastic.

Thanks everyone! For the indented areas on the doors, I printed some suitable positive shapes in polystyrene. I gave them a quick sand and filled in any low spots with auto body filler. These were positioned on the bed of my vacuum former and a sheet of 0.5mm card was loaded in the frame. Here's the result: The detail is a little soft in places, particularly the two smallest dents in the middle column. I'll have to try a second pull to see if I can get those smaller ones to resolve a little better. Here I've cut and glued the dents for one of the doors: and the back side: I'm very pleased this worked out. It's something I have been thinking about for a while: vacuum forming over a 3D printed shape.

Fantastic paint work! The space suit and helmet look so good. That John Hurt melon is a big improvement over the supplied one, too.

I've got everything cranked up: Depth 10 (deepest), Speed 1 (slowest), Force 33 (max), 2 passes. I've had great results right out of the gate. I'm using the blade that came with it (ratchet blade). I have not tried the deep cut blade yet. The pieces won't be cut clear, you'll need to snap them out by flexing the plastic along the score. They do snap clean, even along curves. This thing is a game changer and pretty cheap @ $119 USD. I

I started my first project of 2019...a scale model of the Nostromo Airlock from the 1979 movie Alien. I will be working from this Ron Cobb concept drawing and a handful of photos and frame grabs from the movie. I have recently bought a "Silhouette Portrait" cutting machine and will be using that to do most of the tricky styrene cutting. I'm starting with the outer doors, which I have cut out the various pieces which will be layered and glued together. The machine is amazing. I never could have cut those out by hand in a million years. The doors are cut from .030" styrene. the raise panel details are cut from .020". Things are starting to be glued. I've wrapped the outer edges of the doors with thin strips of styrene. These broke when I bent them and will need a bit of filler, but over all things are off to a good start. Unfortunately, I ran out of my favorite glue (Tamiya Extra Thin) which is worse than running out of beer, because the local shops sell beer. So it will be a week or more till I can do any more assembly. Thanks for looking in.

Nice work! With oils, I recommend using a piece of cardboard for a palette. It will absorb the linseed oil, allowing the paint to dry faster and with a matte sheen.

Awesome! Did that start as a Sketch-up model as well?

Thanks for the thorough explanation. I recently got a Silhouette brand cutter, but I've yet to put it though it's paces. It looks like it will be a game changer. You're really doing some inspirational stuff with yours. Peter

That looks amazing. Great work! How do you get the Sketch-up files into a form your cutting machine can deal with?

Thanks fellas, I really appreciate it!

A few touch ups are needed here and there and maybe a final weathering pass, but I'm going to call this finished. I used Vallejo acrylics for the base colors and weathered with cheap student grade oil paints and odorless thinners. Thanks everybody for following along. I really appreciate all the encouragement.

Glad to help. Unfortunately, the dial indicator cost more than the printer. I borrow that one from work when I need to level.

Ah, I didn't realize there was much model specific tweaking that had to be done. Very good to know. Do the transparent resins cure better than the opaque ones (i.e. Better UV transmission)? Also, do you do a post-cure? I know some people use those UV nail drying lamps.

That's really amazing. It's crazy how nice it prints for so little money. Is the resin very expensive? I think the Anycubic Photon stands alone at the moment. I don't think it really has any competition at that price. I'm pretty sure I'll be getting one. Thanks for posting.

I really like HIPS. But you're right, not many folks are printing it as a primary material. There's been very little guidance online that I could find to help me through some of the difficulties that I've had. I have a couple of parts on the ship that were printed in resin on a Formlabs printer we have at work. I was able to get the guy who runs it to piggyback my parts in with another job he was doing. Unfortunately, I don't think I can make a habit of that. I may get a DLP printer at some point. I think prices will really start coming down in the next few years.

Thanks! I guess I could have used ABS, but I thought sticking with the same material throughout the build would be better. The plastic card and tubes are HIPS, as are the model kit parts. (HIPS stands for High Impact Polystyrene). The Tamiya cement that I'm using works amazingly well with the filament and it sands beautifully. Sometimes when you glue materials together that have different coefficients of thermal expansion, gaps and seams will show up at the joints down the road. Granted the CTE mismatch between ABS and HIPS is probably negligible, compared with, say, aluminum and oak. As for combining 3D printed polystyrene with kit-bashing and scratch building, I'm really starting to see the possibilities that it holds. Filament deposition printing can't deliver the detail demanded by scale modellers, but it excels at complex forms that would be very difficult to build in any other way. Kit parts can then be used to add some of that missing detail.

Hey thanks everybody! I really appreciate it. This is my first scratch build (and really my first model since I was a kid, for that matter). It's something I've wanted to try every since I saw a TV special in the early 80's about special effects that showed the ILM model shop. Prior to this, I did have a false start trying to build the Spice Harvester from the David Lynch Dune movie (something I plan to return to). Tonight I took a few shots of things roughly assembled so you could get an idea of the whole ship. There is still a lot of small things to be done before paint (like learn how to paint, ha ha). I also built a stand, something I probably should have thought about from the beginning. Anyway, here's some photos. All the major pieces are just dry fit or double sticky taped. -Peter

Some more updates...For the most part I'll let the photos do the talking. Questions welcome. More mechanical detail, this time for the rear of the craft. This was built up from some 1:35 scale tank parts. Here it is in place with some primer The tank-like bit was turned from a styrene rod and topped with an acrylic hemisphere. If you look close, you can see the junction where some filler is needed... Next up are the smaller antenna-like paddles on the rear of the cab. These were made from some styrene tubes and rods and some cut-down helicopter blades from an old Fujimi kit. The paddle ends are a bit bigger than the ones in the drawing because I wanted to preserved some of the detail, but they look a bit bulky, so I may cut them down further. I also built up some detail to suggest a motor of sorts that might control them. I've also been adding more details to the front of the cab and was able to get some primer down to see how things are working Here the stalks are just temporarily stuck on. Top view: Thanks for sticking around through such a picture heavy post. Overall, I'm very pleased with how things are coming along. I really hope to get some paint on here soon and start weathering things.

I was also able to get some primer on a few of the parts. The rear part of the ship (or abdomen, in insect terms) needed some more detail. I printed out a pile of styrene rings and sanded back some primer on the 'abdomen' to get a good glue bond. once they were glued in place, I blended the transition with some epoxy putty. I also started detailing the rudder-like things, using standard hobby store styrene shapes. thanks for any interest. -Peter

Thanks for the encouragement! Okay, this is a bit of an odds & sods post...some old work (that I had forgotten about) and some recent developments. One of the first things that I built when I started this model (back in May 2017), was to detail the cockpit, something not really spelled out in the concept sketch. I had an idea of an open framework suspended in the bubble, maybe giving the impression that it uses gyros to always stay level while the ship maneuvers. So with this in mind I starting in on some 1:72 tank parts. I think it could use some finessing, but its close to what I had in mind. Just last week I found these awesome HO scale astronauts! I couldn't believe my luck. Two of them were seated even. The details are a little soft, but who the hell am I to complain?

Absolutely top notch work. Thanks for taking the time to document the process so thoroughly.