Bentley 4 1/2 litre Blower in 1/12th scale - may contain Airfix.

[nick]

 My theory is that the kit is pretty sparse on detail and the floor really is a big, flat featureless (probably wooden) thing in real life, so Airfix just made this pattern up to make it look a bit more busy. 

I think these are nearer original condition than the shiny restored version I found earlier - both wood again. 
 

r

 

I shall be going for wood anyway, rightly or wrongly. 

[Noel Smith]

If anyone has a photo of the floor of Ralph Lauren's car, the subject of the Airfix Bentley we will know for sure.

 

I agree that the tread plate floor looks a bit odd and if incorrect why would Airfix opt for it instead of a simulated wood floor in plastic?

 

It is not as though they could not do it. Considering the age of the kit they managed to make quite nice seats and got the rexine covered body simulated quite nicely too. However, the kit I have to build is one of the original first issue batch and as the kit has been reissued a number of times now, some of that original definition may have deteriorated due to mould wear. 

 

Having looked at later reissues a lot of parts that were previously dull aluminium plated are now just plain plastic.

[nick]

59 minutes ago, Noel Smith said:

If anyone has a photo of the floor of Ralph Lauren's car, the subject of the Airfix Bentley we will know for sure.

You made me look harder! (which is good) this IS chassis HR3976 reg UR6571 , owned by Ralph Lauren as you say.

 

 

It looks non standard if there is such a thing? or at least not like the others I can find in as much it seems to have an odd, slanty footrest affair which does appear to have expanded metal (or similar) on it. The rest of the floor looks like bare ali to me.

 

Somewhat perversely, airfix seem to have modeled the slanty bit (not present on any other 4 1/2L blower I can find) with a plain surface, and the rest of the floor with the expanded metal stuff, ie the opposite of the reference photos, maybe when they looked at it, the entire floor had this stuff, or at least you can see where they maybe got the idea from anyway.

 

Anyway my search led me to these beauties where you can see what's going on more clearly, and I think are also more representative of a typical car, so thats what Im going for

 

 

Thanks for making me put some effort into getting this right(er)

 

Nick

 

 

[Bengalensis]

Something that has happened so many times is that the kit maker do their research on a restored car many years after the race the kit is supposed to depict. This kit was issued in 1971 and probably when Airfix had access to the car would have been 1969-1970 something, some 40 years after the race- and in a time when restoring important cars historically detail correct was not always a major concern. It still often isn't by the way. I wouldn't be surprised if the car at that point in time had a non original metal floor fitted, which may well have been replaced again in the fifty years after. Now I don't know about this chassis, but these things happens quite often.

[Dancona]

The normal practice with these types of bodies is to have a series of wooden floorboards which can be lifted out to gain access to all the oily bits underneath, any aluminium bits would be screwed onto the wood, driving around with some of them out is also a good way of identifying where funny noises are coming from, but also very disconcerting !!

Also please note that with the pedals, the central one is the accelerator, couple that with a crash gearbox, non servo assisted rod brakes and very heavy steering (plus on the blowers an enormous throttle lag due to the carbs being so far away from the engine proper), and you have a real handful !!!!

 

Cheers

 

David 

 

[PROPELLER]

And... I defy anyone to find two "blower" similar. It's not a Ford "T"!

 

Dan.

[Noel Smith]

Looks like things are pointing to wooden floorboards as being the norm. Maybe the Airfix treadplate floor may have been a bit of a notion on their part.. But I cannot understand why they would choose to do that if the car they had full access to had wooden flooring?

 

Quite easy for Nick to laser I would imagine from thin ply or similar.

 

Also, as a thought, those thin straight coffee stirrers from Costas/Starbucks could be made into planking very easily by the individual modeller. Only a matter of cutting to length with a razor saw it they are close to scale width. What could look better than real wood scale planks  varnished?

Edited June 6, 2023 by Noel Smith

[nick]

Good some wooden goings on happening in parallel with drawing accurate Bentley mesh in fusion 360, so one extreme to the other - whittling and CAD. 
 

All good fun. 
 

Nick

[nick]

Bloody Hell I've come over all nostalgic now - chopping up bits of wood, filing stuff, even hitting things with a hammer in a vice! not a computer in sight. I'm off for a lie down now.

 

 

Looks more plausible to me anyhoo.

 

Back to what passes for normality in my world anyway, heres the fuel tank

 

I custom drew the mesh to replicate the Bentley stuff, its just a repeated pattern in the end but in three dimensions so makes the old machine creak a bit!

 

Havent figured out how to bend it yet either for the wrap around bit -could be tricky, theres a lot going on with it.

 

Nick

[Pete in Lincs]

Nick sunbed @nick Now, where's the waiter with the cocktails? It's thirsty work watching this stuff you know.

[Noel Smith]

Nothing wrong with nostalgic ways of working as well as being a whizz kid on the CAD Nick.

Often they have a way of complimenting each other.

I wish you well with the mesh wraparound conundrum.

[albergman]

2 hours ago, nick said:

Bloody Hell I've come over all nostalgic now - chopping up bits of wood, filing stuff, even hitting things with a hammer in a vice! not a computer in sight. I'm off for a lie down now.

WHAT WHAT WHAT????    Making something by hand???   What's the world coming to ... LOL.   I started wondering as soon as I read that the floors should be wood ... now will Nick replicate wood in Fusion and 3D print it?   Hats off to you for going the analogue route Nick!    I can't imagine how stressed out you must be.  🤣

 

Frank

 

 

[nick]

41 minutes ago, albergman said:

WHAT WHAT WHAT????    Making something by hand???   What's the world coming to ... LOL.   I started wondering as soon as I read that the floors should be wood ... now will Nick replicate wood in Fusion and 3D print it?   Hats off to you for going the analogue route Nick!    I can't imagine how stressed out you must be.  🤣

 

Frank

 

 

As you say Frank , I did actually ask myself what would look like wood? I know! Wood. I may still attack it with the CNC machine- it needs cut outs!😈

[nick]

The fuel tank mesh just  looks like a vague pattern in that shot - it isn't, this shows it better (and the problem)

 

 

I somehow need to wrap a flat sheet of this stuff around the contours of the Fuel Tank, I suspect I'm going to have to come out of fusion to achieve this and deform the mesh in something else (like Blender)

[Noel Smith]

I can see that the wrap around mesh around the fuel tank will not be easy to achieve.

I guess that all the supporting metalwork for it will be made in situ as part of the 3D print?

If that does not work out how flexible would just the mesh be as a separate item if designed to fit into a 3D generated framework ?

[Malc2]

There is a time to use 3D printing and a time to use the real stuff - as your wooden floor.

The mesh is when I would be using the real stuff.

Comes in as many hole and wire sizes as you could wish for.

Shirley - it's easier than printing it?

 

Malc.

[nick]

10 minutes ago, Malc2 said:

There is a time to use 3D printing and a time to use the real stuff - as your wooden floor.

The mesh is when I would be using the real stuff.

Comes in as many hole and wire sizes as you could wish for.

Shirley - it's easier than printing it?

 

Malc.

It is but I was looking to market the fuel tank so I’m looking for repeatability. I would absolutely use real mesh for a one-off of my own 

[HOUSTON]

On 5/31/2023 at 11:46 AM, nick said:

I tried lasering them and it left burn marks as I suspected, and its just too small to engrave ultimately. This is a simulation with 0.1mm engraving cutter - the smallest available. I guess I could widen the pointer needles to 0.1 which wont be too far out of scale. Might try that tomorrow

when the finer pointed tools arrive as I don't actually have any right now to try.

 

What did we do before Amazon? - I can't remember.

 

No really I can't remember.

Anything.

Luckily I have machines to do that for me

 

 

VERY IMPRESSIVE  work..

Nick, 

Having gone through most of your build I fibd your methodical  approach and innovative ways to build your model is AMAZING. 

Edited June 6, 2023 by HOUSTON

[nick]

9 hours ago, Noel Smith said:

I can see that the wrap around mesh around the fuel tank will not be easy to achieve.

I guess that all the supporting metalwork for it will be made in situ as part of the 3D print?

If that does not work out how flexible would just the mesh be as a separate item if designed to fit into a 3D generated framework ?

Yes exactly re the metal work. 
 

I wondered about bending a flat printed sheet ‘in post’ as well, as us video guys say 😎I’m sure it would bend OK certainly with heat, hot water for example. 
its not ‘proper’ though is it? I had a similar issue with fuel injector boots on my F40 engine where they were a tapered convoluted tube that bent over with the cable, I ported them to Blender and it worked OK.

 

these things:-

 

drawn straight in fusion, bent in blender. It’s exactly the same process really.

 

The only thing I don’t like is they aren’t solids anymore and you’re stuck with them just being meshses (in the 3D lingo sense of the word) it gets extremely confusing as the thing we are talking about is an actual physical mesh as well! Sorry, there’s probably about 2 people that understood any of that. 

[Jered]

17 minutes ago, nick said:

The only thing I don’t like is they aren’t solids anymore and you’re stuck with them just being meshses (in the 3D lingo sense of the word) it gets extremely confusing as the thing we are talking about is an actual physical mesh as well! Sorry, there’s probably about 2 people that understood any of that. 

I laughed, but that's because I'm a massive nurbs (nerd)

Would it be a possibility to create a grasshopper script to generate the curves from which you'd be able to construct the solids? Just a thought!

 

Loving the build.

Jered

[nick]

This appears to be the solution

 

 

I really should make friends with Blender, it’s very powerful and I always end up having a fight with it because I don’t know it well enough - I need to put the hours in, although onshape looks interesting too, anyone know either/both well enough to comment?
 

stay tuned!

[PROPELLER]

Hi Nick,

 

Seeing along your fantastic 3D work, and the result once printed, I though that it's not appropriate for the small scales, 1/12 included.

I think it would be perfect for 1/8 scale. But it's just my point of view...

 

Dan.

[nick]

38 minutes ago, PROPELLER said:

Hi Nick,

 

Seeing along your fantastic 3D work, and the result once printed, I though that it's not appropriate for the small scales, 1/12 included.

I think it would be perfect for 1/8 scale. But it's just my point of view...

 

Dan.

Dan, I work in 1:1 for my drawings so any scale is possible. There are still elements preventing me from producing a full 1/8th (or other large scale)  versions ie a complete car, although they are starting to diminish as my kit arsenal grows   

[nick]

OK I’ve got this. I can do it in fusion after all - the wrapped mesh is square-on not diagonal like the sides which makes this possible. 

 

so actually there are only two different upright wire shape profiles and the lateral ones are just straight, so pattern on a path will do most of the work for me. 
 

I’ll put some renders up tomorrow. 

[nick]

this is a classic example of your (my) brain getting in the way of stuff.

 

In the real world we know this is a sheet of mesh - and that's the problem, it isn't, it's some wires arranged in a particular way. So while I've been messing about trying to bend a sheet made of complicated stuff, that was the wrong approach, what we think of as complexity - lots and lots of criss cross wires, in CAD isn't complex at all, its just a small number of simple elements repeated a lot of times.

 

Actually it's only 4 different wires -  2 vertical shapes, 2 horizontal shapes, repeated. so in the end, once I figured this out, I just had to draw 4 wires and repeat them. Easy - Done.

 

 

Nick