Westland Wessex. Bits, Various, for the use of. Transmission Deck & Cockpit set now added for 2024

[Bozothenutter]

On 11/11/2023 at 9:40 PM, hendie said:

 

I think I'll run these as a single assembly just for ease of handling and if they were separate pieces they'd be a nightmare to assemble.  The whole thing is just over 20mm wide

 

 

But I live for nightmares!

Would buy.....

[Pete in Lincs]

7 hours ago, perdu said:

I visualise @Hendieparts needing to take on staff...

Certain Elves will be redundant by Boxing day. Just saying...

 

The results are looking fab, Alan. BTW, Droop stops. Little blue pills?

[HartDeco]

Hi all.

 

A few weeks ago I ordered both Wessex sets from Hendi and all I can say is that the quality is outstanding. Also, the parts were sent by him on very short notice. A big thanks to @hendie

 

Here are a few photos of the main parts that form the engine bay. The fit is as good as it gets but some trimming of the plastic parts is necessary because the thickness of the plastic parts is very inconsistent.

 

René

 

 

 

Edited November 24, 2023 by HartDeco

[grubber]

Just came across this little gem, how do I order a set?

[HartDeco]

12 minutes ago, grubber said:

Just came across this little gem, how do I order a set?

Just send Hendie a message.

 

René

[hendie]

5 hours ago, HartDeco said:

some trimming of the plastic parts is necessary because the thickness of the plastic parts is very inconsistent.

 hi René, yes there was not a lot I could do to get around Italeri's molding.  I assume you do mean the kit when you talk about inconsistent thickness?

 

It looks like you are doing a great job there.  Just an FYI - those two "L" shaped legs on the rear of the electronics bay can be removed if you plan to open up those bays.  The L shaped supports were there mainly to help during the printing process.

 

 

[HartDeco]

2 minutes ago, hendie said:

 hi René, yes there was not a lot I could do to get around Italeri's molding.  I assume you do mean the kit when you talk about inconsistent thickness?

 

It looks like you are doing a great job there.  Just an FYI - those two "L" shaped legs on the rear of the electronics bay can be removed if you plan to open up those bays.  The L shaped supports were there mainly to help during the printing process.

 

 

Yes, I was talking about the thickness of the plastic parts.

I kept the L shaped parts to straighten the floor at the far end a bit. It was slightly curved. Easy fix.

 

René

[HartDeco]

Hi all.

 

The quality of the @hendie 3D printed parts is quite a bit better than the kit parts are. To be fair, the kit was never designed to fit any aftermarket parts to begin with of course.

Anyway, I modified the chin/air intake a bit to make the new parts fit. A lot of filler was needed to make the 'floor' smooth. Also, a thin piece of plastic was used to fill the remaining gaps.

 

René

 

 

 

 

[hendie]

Wow!  That is looking seriously good, René

 

 

[hendie]

Post #1 of this thread updated with latest info to save people having to hunt through the thread in order to find pricing details.

 

FYI.  I will be increasing prices slightly on 1st January 2024, so get your orders in before the end of the year.

 

Thanks to all who have ordered so far - I hope the sets have met with your expectations.

 

Hendie

 

 

[Terry1954]

37 minutes ago, hendie said:

I hope the sets have met with your expectations.

 

They most certainly do Alan!

 

Terry

[hendie]

A small update to finish off November and to let you know that work is still continuing (despite life's best efforts) to keep this project moving along.

 

Bear in mind that this is still very early in development and there's a long way to go yet.

 

First up, the MRGB and a few small greeblies underway, with many more to come.

 

Followed by the swash plate pushmepullyou

 

Lastly, the units combined

 

 

I'm still trying to figure out the best way print this - as a full assembly, or as discreet components, and also which of the plumbing lines to include, if that is even possible.

Stay tuned, but dont hold your breath.

 

As I mentioned above - still a long way to on this. It's definitely going to roll into next year given the limited time I have available to work on it.

My ideal plan would be to produce a full transmission deck, but we'll need to wait and see how far I get on that.

 

 

 

[Wafu]

The MGB with the Servo’s look brilliant.

[Pete in Lincs]

19 minutes ago, hendie said:

My ideal plan would be to produce a full transmission deck

Er, WOW!

[Bozothenutter]

Somebody will have to tell me what that is...🫣

[hendie]

2 hours ago, Bozothenutter said:

Somebody will have to tell me what that is...🫣

 

It's the deck that the main rotor gearbox sits on - it contains the MRGB, cooling fan and a bunch of other hydraulics and greeblies.

 

On 11/29/2023 at 4:19 PM, Pete in Lincs said:

Er, WOW!

 

I never said it was going to be accurate 

 

 

[hendie]

Still very much a work in progress and now nearing a slow down phase.

I really need to print out a test version before going any further, but I've been busy catching up on orders over the last two weeks and didn't want to slow down production... car trouble and life threw a bagful of spanners at me last week, and I missed a couple of days production.

 

Without having a test print in my hands it's very difficult to tell if I have things in the right ballpark, scale wise. 

Here's the rotor brake assembly, or at least some semblance of it.

 

 

Followed by a view of it alongside the gearbox

 

 

Front'ish view

 

 

And you can see I've started adding some more detail around the gearbox itself. 

 

 

The majority of this detail is in the sub-millimeter realm so until that print is in my mitts I'm not sure how this is all going to turn out, but based on past results, my hopes are high.

 

For those that have placed orders over the last few weeks: the 1/48 prints are almost finished and I'll need a few days to clean up and package things. The 1/72 prints will follow very shortly after that, followed by the 1/32 prints (which are going to take a bit longer as there is still some design work to be done on those.)

All things going well, I should be able to start sending packages out around the end of next week.

 

 

 

 

 

[coneheadff]

Wow...absolutely fantastic work, Alan!!!

[Caerbannog]

Really amazing work. Too bad I already finished my Wessex. Might have to get another one...

[hendie]

A little pre-Xmas update to whet the appetites.

 

First up is that old nugget, the 1/32  beetleback.

Unfortunately this was not a simple case of scaling the beetleback I had created for the italeri version, and this had to be redrawn from scratch.

The forward facing surface on italeris kits are an (almost) perfect semi-circle.  Not so on the Fly kit.  Surprised?  No.

Since I had to use lofted surfaces for the overall shape, and those lofts were very early on in the design tree, it meant that when I went back and changed the profile it blew the model up.  There were so many areas to fix that it was easier to start from scratch. 

This little effort took somewhere around 5  or 6 hours to complete.

 

 

The biggest issue with the Fly offering is that instead of a simple semi-circle, Fly decided for some obscure reason to splay the bottom end out quite significantly. Look at the outer lines on the highlighted blue section here.

 

That "design" caused issues further down the line when it came to adding the louvers as the spray messed up the spacing in several areas.

It's not perfect but it was the best I could manage and still make it fit the Fly kit.

I can't believe that Fly kit is still kicking my butt all these years after finishing it.

 

Now for something a bit more interesting - the Trans deck area.

Port side shown here. There are still a few small items to add (and a floor, maybe) but for the most part, the port side is now complete.

 

 

The starboard side is proving a lot more challenging, though not from a geometry/ modeling standpoint.  It's the fact that the transdeck is a rarely photographed area, and when it does see a camera, it's the port side that gets all the glory.  Photos of the starboard side are proving impossible to find.  There are a few (very few) photos out there but the resolution is so low that they only hint at the detail.  It's been 4 decades since I worked on these and I really can't remember much at all about that area.

I know there's a reservoir and a filter housing,  but I haven't been able to find clear details of how they are mounted. I guess I'm going to have to start making stuff up for this region.

 

 

 

A view from above. Not much else to say really. Looks quite busy though. I think the bracing legs need spread out a bit more but I'll need to see how much room there is inside the kit first. Tweaking that spacing is straightforward enough.

 

 

I managed to catch up with most of the orders this week and even get ahead in some areas. That meant I could afford some time to run a test print this weekend.

It should be ready tomorrow so I'll be able to tell how far off I am in this design, and it will give me the chance to start making the tweaks necessary to make it fit italeri's kits. Hopefully I won't be too far off.

 

If the gods are willing, I might even get to post some shots of the test prints before Santa sweeps the chimney.

 

 

 

 

[Pete in Lincs]

Another great update, Alan. On the Starboard side I remember runs of Hydraulic pipes bolted down with paxolene blocks but not much else. Sorry.

Have a great Christmas, Mate. Hope you come out the other side with some goodies from the fat bloke.

[hendie]

12 hours ago, Pete in Lincs said:

runs of Hydraulic pipes bolted down with paxolene blocks but not much else. Sorry.

 

 that's about as much as I remember Pete. That and the fact that was the side you had to crawl under to get at that bloody magnetic plug under the gearbox.

 

 

[hendie]

All sorted!  I found the information I need in the 4+ book.  

[hendie]

The results are in for the first test print folks.

 

 It's promising so far but there's still a lot of work to be done to get this to fit the Italeri kit, which as we all know is a bit of a mess.

For the test piece I opted to print the entire MRGB as a one piece.  I'm still not sure if I should break it up as the component parts are so small they would be incredibly fragile and a nightmare to assemble. I'm going to leave it to the end user to add as much plumbing as they wish, or not.

 

 

Now, this is where it starts to get complicated. 

I have designed the MRGB in a vertical stance whereas, in reality it has a three degree tilt forward. Italeri have it closer to 5 degrees or more.  I now have to add a tilt and have the rotor shaft hole in exactly the same location as Italeri's or the PE mesh won't fit properly. I'll have to create a jig to reference that hole location.

I also have to separate out the swash plate torque link as italeri haven't accounted for that and the mesh will not fit over the hendiepart MRGB as it currently stands.

They also have the trans deck floor too low, and just to add the icing to the cake, their cabin roof is too narrow for the fuselage by a good 1 to 2 millimeters.

 

The main question here is: Do I design this area to fit directly on to the kit floor? Or should I use that as a sub floor and create a new floor above it?  There are many rabbit holes in this kit and I don't want to disappear down too many of them.

 

 

That bulkhead in the kit is non-existent on the 1:1 and is in reality, just a frame. The real bulkhead sits further back on the transmission deck.

 

I think I'll go with using the kit floor. It's a bit of a cop out, but if I want this to fit both the 1:48 and the 1:72 kits, things would get extremely messy and I only have so much time I can devote to this. Sometimes a compromise has to be made and I think this is one of those times.

 

 

 

 

 

[hendie]

'Tis the festive season so what's a poor boy to do but sit in front of a computer all day and draw bits of Wessex, eh?

 

I'm sure I could have found more pleasurable activities but I feel I am getting close with this now and the digital mojo was rising above the simmer. It seemed in the best interests of all that I shut myself away in a room for a few hours and stare at a screen and some reference photos.

Tilt now added.

 

Gearbox tilt that is, forward by 3 degrees.  I had to redraw the support frame from scratch as the two front sts are now shorter to accommodate the forward angle.  I also widened the track of the supports as they reach the outer edge of the trans deck floor on the 1:1 and Italeri had them (no surprise) too narrow.  There's a certain degree of fudging going on here as the Italeri kit is so far off in places, so I've bought another artists licence and played a bit loose with the truth, but no-one other than a Wessex xpert will ever know the difference. And you lot, of course.

 

A front'ish view

 

Followed by a back'ish view from the other side.

 

 

A few things have been updated since these screenshots were taken.  The torque link has been taken out and is now it's own separate part (to allow the PE mesh to fit over the head). The cooling fan has been updated to add pipework to the starboard side, and I've also made the cooling fan pulley a separate part. The latter was to allow me to put a hole in the fan front, which in turn allowed me to print the cooling fan vertically and allow the resin captured inside to drain out.

 

My first test print did not go according to plan, mainly due to my own ineptitude.  I failed to notice I had not placed the parts correctly on the print bed and the oil filter housing ended up being printed as part of the main gearbox assembly. D'oh!  

 

 

That aside, it did allow me to test the newly added tilt and see if the gearbox was going to work in the confines of the kit.  I had made up this fixture earlier with a hole lining up with Italeri's offering which allowed me to test the latest design.

I'm going to call that a win.

 

 

In case anyone is wondering, this is what the MRGB looks like after a quick wash and ready to trim.  This will give you an idea of why I put my prices up slightly for the New Year.  It is quite time consuming to remove all those supports while trying not to damage any parts of the gearbox itself.  Multiply this by the number of orders and it quickly eats up many, many hours of effort

 

 

The end effect however will be worth it.  Trying to photograph the grey resin is an impossible task, but when painted up and a few bits of plumbing added, I think this will look  great in anyone's build.

 

 

I know the position of the cooling fan and the hoop frame is wrong in this shot, but aside from that, I think I'm about done with these parts.

 

 

I still have the rotor head to finish off as well as create a new swash plate, but I am hoping to get these finished and ready to order by mid to late January, at least for the 1:48 scale parts. (and still working on some 1/32 parts). 

I'll need to run some test prints to see if this can successfully be scaled down to 1:72. Hopes are high but I think I might need to do some tweaking to make it all work. We shall see.

 

Since I have a Set A (Engine Bay), and a Set B (Fuselage), I thought I would keep with tradition and make this Set C Transmission Deck.

 

Set C Transmission Deck  will (at this time) consist of:

• Main rotor gearbox
• MRGB torque link
• Rotor brake
• Cooling fan
• Cooling fan pulley
• Hoop frame
• Winch hatch door stop (stbd side)
• Reservoir (stbd side)
• Filter housing (stbd side)
• Cockpit bulkhead reservoir (port side)
• Floor cross beam

 

and perhaps another bit or two depending upon how much time I have to spare over the coming weeks.  I'll need to take a look at pricing but I think it will be in the same range as the other sets, with a discount if multiple sets are ordered/combined.

I think this will really add some bling to any build where someone is brave enough to open up the transmission area. Just think of the hours of fun you can have adding all the plumbing  

 

I shall try and get some parts from the latest test run primed and photographed as it's difficult to see all the detailed in bare naked grey resin.