Italeri Bugatti Type 35B

[Noel Smith]

At the rate you are going with the Bugatti engine and other parts I reckon you might get them to market before the Bentley bits Nick!

[nick]

2 minutes ago, Noel Smith said:

At the rate you are going with the Bugatti engine and other parts I reckon you might get them to market before the Bentley bits Nick!

That is likely TBH because this is a shoe in, it should drop straight into the kit without modification (he not having tried it yet!)

 

Getting serious now anyway, some bits may be making an appearance in the real world shortly, you never know

 

 

Nick

[nick]

First print.

 

And its not bad if I do say so myself.

 

This is why I spent all that time getting the printer dialled in, the only issues I have here are the usual few inadequate supports and a one or two wall thickness issues, otherwise for a first print I'm happy.

 

So this has been a great test of my new workflow - I've drawn everything full size, not printed anything along the way. Then went straight to a completely full/near production build plate and it's worked pretty well.

 

This will save so much time effort and resin in future.

 

 

Ignore the paint applied from a passing helicopter - I couldn't wait to see how it looked and it's only the first one off

 

 

First observation is that one of us is out of scale. I had the original drawings (unusually) for this one, so it ain't me.

 

The Italeri engine may have been shrunk intentionally for an easier fit in the engine bay - all the panels will be much thicker in plastic that the sheet metal real thing of course.

 

I'll have to see how my version offers up to the rest of the kit. It looks like Italeri applied a constant scale factor anyway, so the reduced equally in X,Y and Z so it's not a big deal to do the same. This is why it's so much better to draw in 1:1 I would be messing about with all kinds of weird numbers now otherwise.

 

 

Thanks for looking

 

Nick

 

[nick]

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have noticed that I printed off the revised body screws as part of this. I’ve got some ridiculously thin winding wire now as well, so I’ll do some testing tomorrow hopefully. 
 

Nick

[bgparis]

hi nick

 

Printed engine looks great, the scale difference shows mainly on the height of the engine;

 

Couldn't EZ line used for rigging WWI aircraft or 0.1mm fishing line be used on the body screws?

regards

[Noel Smith]

You can certainly see where some compromises have had to have been made to enable the injection moulded process on the Italeri engine.

The nice thing about 3D printing is the freedom from those restraints enabling much better accuracy.

Having the Haynes 35B book is a blessing  with some good official factory drawings in it. Much better than the Bentley one that I also have.

I see what you mean by it being easier to reduce a one to one drawing in three axes, rather than from an already scaled down drawing.

The prototyping that you have already done looks good, so I guess that there will be a few 'tweaks' here and there to do.

[nick]

14 minutes ago, Noel Smith said:

Having the Haynes 35B book is a blessing  with some good official factory drawings in it. Much better than the Bentley one that I also have.

I think the Bugatti Haynes manual is probably the best one I’ve seen for this job anyway, I’ve got loads of them and it’s a real lottery, some are near useless, but the Bugatti one is great, I suspect because it has been extensively re-drawn in CAD recently and I think all of the drawings are freely available unlike a lot of older cars. 
 

Nick

[nick]

39 minutes ago, bgparis said:

hi nick

 

Printed engine looks great, the scale difference shows mainly on the height of the engine;

 

Couldn't EZ line used for rigging WWI aircraft or 0.1mm fishing line be used on the body screws?

regards

Yes maybe, this stuff is 0.0132mm though!

[Sabrejet]

IIRC, locking wire is 22 SWG (the usual type that is) - 0.71mm full-scale. So circa 0.06mm in 1/12.

[gordinir8]

44 minutes ago, Sabrejet said:

IIRC, locking wire is 22 SWG (the usual type that is) - 0.71mm full-scale. So circa 0.06mm in 1/12.

Standard aircraft wire is .032, that's 0.81mm, in 1/12 scale is 0.06mm! Sometimes going overscale or underscale in modelling brings better results. IMO using this this 0.13 fishing line and paint it silver is better, it is visible in the model and doesn't look out of scale. Besides I don't think there is 0.06mm wire available. 

[Sabrejet]

1 hour ago, gordinir8 said:

Standard aircraft wire is .032, that's 0.81mm

 

SWG in the civilised world 😉

[Noel Smith]

Plated craft beading wire is available in fine gauges and is quite supple so should be ok for this application. I used it on my Type 59 that I scratchbuilt  for SMW Telford 2012.

[gordinir8]

6 hours ago, Sabrejet said:

 

SWG in the civilised world 

Just 32 or 22 in the hangar.😉

[nick]

The issue isn’t replicating exact scale thickness of the wire, it’s the low mechanical strength of the scale sized body screws.

 

So anything remotely stiff will break the wings  off the screws - as long as there is something (no matter how thin), strung between fasteners with a twist, it will look fine. Especially as it can always be emphasised with paint if does look too fine. That said I don’t think I’ve ever done anything with wire or rigging on a model and thought ‘that looks too thin’ it’s always the other way around. 
 

this is why I’ve chosen ultra-thin winding wire, also when you look at period photos, the type 35 wire locking looks exceptionally fine to my eye, maybe thinner than the standard sizes quoted here? I may be wrong. 
 

Nick

[Noel Smith]

Strength versus scale is a difficult one for applications such as this one.

It is finding something that looks about right and is useable so there has got to be bit trade off somewhere.

I checked the beading wire that I used on my Bugatti T59

Trimits Beading Wire  Silver finished.  34 gauge.  Measures at 0.2mm thickness.

I would imagine craft stores stock it or a similar wire in another brand name.

Edited January 12, 2023 by Noel Smith

[nick]

Some time ago there was some crazy speculation about seats. How hard can it be? I can knock the seat up in about 10 minutes in Fusion - (done), then I just (JUST) need to apply a texture and some creasing to it, how hard can it be?

 

As you may have gathered all my 3d CAD experience has been making proper, oily, metal engineery type stuff. Seats are squidgy it turns out. Fusion, really doesn't like squidgy. Doesn't like it at all.

 

The small delay you may have experienced was while I learned Blender. Blender loves squidgy.

 

 

This was a different world, this kind of software is amazing and does all kinds of crazy stuff however it's aimed at 3D rendered content creation, think games animation etc so all the incredible materials available (like leather in this case) are aimed at that, so don't work for 3D printing.

SO you have a smooth body, the seat in this case then you apply a shader, which is a bit like painting it, so you apply colour, texture, 3d depth etc, all that stuff and it looks great. HOWEVER its kind of like a fancy 3d sticker that would be impossible in the real world, so if you tried to print this, you would just get the smooth body minus all the nice leather texture.

 

So it turns out you have to take your CAD object, turn it into a very fine mesh, then you start to sculpt it to add the creases, then you apply the texture as something called a bump map which takes a B&W image of leather grain in this case, and turns into a displacement map that microscopically varies the surface height of the shell of the seat in the pattern of the leather.

 

Easy eh?

 

Thanks for looking  

 

Nick

[nick]

So not a complete disaster and I know where I went wrong. I drew the base seat shape in fusion, so it looks like a mechanical component, mostly flat, smooth, regular, uniform, then imported it and added creases in blender. 

 

I now know I need to go over to the dark side and sculpt the whole shooting match in blender, so it isn’t as regular and mechanical looking. 

so I did what Italeri did and basically designed two flat slabs with grooves in. The real thing isn’t like that it’s far more subtle - more like bunched sausages in fact, so I’ll have another go.

The texture is probably a bit too subtle as well but the technique works.
 

Although not right, I don’t think this is a bad start. 
 

here’s the target

 

 

back to the (virtual) drawing board (literally!)

 

Nick

 

[nick]

Before I disappear down another rabbit hole with this, calling all Bugatti experts out there - is the bottom squab portion of this seat correct? it just replicates the top section design with the stripey sections following through in the kit and other models, but I can't find a single real-life example of this, all the images I can find have separate plain squabs either with a gap and a curved panel over the prop shaft or a short leather-clad dividing panel as in the brown version above? what do we think? multiple versions perhaps?

 

Nick

[Sabrejet]

Be wary because I think the seats with the gap are Bugatti 51 (twin fuel fillers and IIRC wider than the 35), not Bugatti 35. I'll take a look at my photos to see if I can provide some clear shots of 35 seats in the meantime.

[Malc2]

Hi Nick,

I took some pics of a 35 at the NEC back in Nov last year.

Typically now I look back I did not take one good shot of the seats, but here are the best two, interestingly the divider is wooden.

 

Malc.

[nick]

Thanks folks, I’m sure these things are highly likely to have been replaced over the years, but I’m struggling to find a single example like the Italeri version. The closest match still has two separate and distinct cushions (with no gap) so I don’t think the ‘bench’ idea they have is correct in any case. 
 

like this

 

 

so maybe that’s whats what I’ll go for. I’m sure it’s not a bench. 
 

Nick

[nick]

On 1/12/2023 at 5:46 AM, nick said:

this is why I’ve chosen ultra-thin winding wire, also when you look at period photos, the type 35 wire locking looks exceptionally fine to my eye, maybe thinner than the standard sizes quoted here? I may be wrong. 
 

Nick

I’ve just realised that the wire looks thin because -

1. It is!

2. And It’s a single strand, I had assumed it was a conventional twisted pair like normal wire lock, but it isn’t. It’s a single strand wound around one side of the butterfly screw and just pulled tight to the next one. 

[Fastcat]

Hi Nick,

                    Just to add to the confusion, some Bugattis didn't have a bench type seatback either. The back was separated so that a racing mechanic could position himself better. A number of contemporary race photos show this.

And the seat cushions were both ribbed and plain. I suspect that separate cushions and the central divider came about as a result of racing as the original bench type of seat wouldn't give the driver much support when cornering. Also, the central divider could be leather covered too. Maybe the ribbed seat was more comfortable than the plain cushion. The side cushions also varied, some being full size, others being the minimum needed to keep the driver from resting on the bare metal of the body.

The body locking wires are, more often than not, configured in straight lines, rather than the "stitch" pattern often depicted. They were also missing in some areas and frequently untidy. It depends on how often the mechanics removed the body.

As I'm sure you already know, not all Bugattis were blue. Some were green, white and blue, red, red and yellow, white etc. Basically, after National race colours were adopted, they followed suit.

Please note, I'm far from being a Bugatti expert, if they even exist.

 

Dave

[bgparis]

hi

picture of the green Bugatti n12, Monaco GP winner 1929

it seems there are 2 separate seats, the mechanic's backseat being even thinner 

the body panels locking wires are mainly configured in straight lines, not the often seen "zig-zag" pattern

 

 

[nick]

Just been doing some sums, the Italeri engine is 50.67mm long measured at the cam box, mine is really 1/12th scale (so 8.3333% full size) and taken from the original drawings and comes about at 53.60mm for the same dimension.

 

So by my reckoning Italeri's engine is 94.5% the size it should be. This scaling seems to be linear in all 3 axis so thats OK.

 

I'm just going to print an engine at (I have calculated, possibly correctly) 7.88% full size so if the Gods of modelling look the other way for a moment, might just fit the kit.

 

So How about if I offer a true 1/12th scale engine stand alone, to sit beside the kit, and A NEARLY 1/12th scale version that will actually fit in in it - what do we think?

 

 

Regards

 

Nick