Jul 152011
 

In late 2009 and early 2010, one of my little projects was re-drawing many of the layout drawings contained in Paul Suhler’s excellent “From RAINBOW to GUSTO,” a history of the development of the SR-71. The book has many diagrams of previously unseen designs, but due to printing restrictions, the diagrams were  a lot smaller than I would have liked. I got in touch with the author, and gained permission to redraw and post a number of them. The project was well underway when disaster struck. My computer crashed and took out a whole lot of data with it… including all the CAD drawings. It took a while to get back up and running, and when I finally did, the loss of all that data and hard work was disheartening, and I let the project slip away.

Recently I had cause to re-visit the effort. Much to my amazement I found buried in a mis-labeled file an early backup of the project… it was incomplete, lacking three of the most recent CAD drawings, but enough of it was there to allow me to pick it up again. This morning (around 2AM) I finished the last of them. Now that they are all complete (and backed up!), I will start posting them again, starting where I left off. The format of the diagrams will be a little bit different, but the basic presentation process will be the same. I’ll post a low-rez image, and a link to a password-protected high-resolution version. In order to access the high-rez version, you’ll need to have a copy of “RAINBOW To GUSTO,” as the passwords will be words on specific pages of the book. It seemed to work well enough a  year and a half ago…

Anyway, here is the complete “RAINBOW to GUSTO” drawing collection to whet your appetite. Starting Real Soon Now I’ll begin posting the individual high-rez drawings. This collection drawing shows them all to scale (1/550 scale when printed out D-size… it has been reduced to 1/4 of the original image size, BTW).

Next up: the A-6-5. So, make sure to have your copies of “RAINBOW” handy…

 Posted by at 10:37 am

  6 Responses to “So, like I was saying a year and a half ago…”

  1. Awesome! I got this book for Christmas and am glad to see you working on them again. The A-6-9 was my favorite. Your tip jar has something in it.

    • Thanks! For no readily apparent reason, I’ve also expanded the project a bit to include a lot of sorta-related designs such as Super Hustler, FISH, Kingfish, CL-325, CL-400 and SR-71 derivatives. Damned if I know what I’m going to do with all the drawings, but I’ll have ’em anyway…

  2. Yep, the A-6-9 seems to have been an attempt to approximate the flying saucer shape, the benefits of which Frank Rodgers and Convair independently discovered. See also the three-views of Convair’s Kingfish; it’s more obvious there than with FISH, which had a ventral inlet.

    Thanks for the compliments, Scott!

    Paul

  3. Hello admin,

    Recently I decided to do some workshop about SR-71 Blackbird. Now I am doing high-detail 2D/3D model and I really happy that I found your web resource. In your “Aerospace Drawings and Documents” section I found a drawings only about A12 and YF-12. Do you have something special about SR-71 A itself. I mean high-detailed blue prints?

    Thanks in advance, Dmytro, Vienna.

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