An apparently vintage 1/96 scale Saturn V display model on ebay, apparently built at the NASA-MSFC model shop back in the day. Just a smidge above my pay grade at a Buy It Now price of 20 large. I’ve seen thespiffy, to say the least.se in museums…
Another ebay auction presents a display model of a transport version of the McD Model 260 VTOL from the 1970’s:
A great many Model 260 variants were designed, all based on the same basic concept: an aircraft shaped much like a corporate jet, featuring a pair of turbofan engines of very high bypass ratio located in shrouds which could unfold to direct the thrust downward for vertical lift and hover. Unlike the Rockwell XFV-12, the Model 260 could probably have worked, but it was never built.
Something I stumbled across on ebay:
No indication is given as to the date of the thing. But it sure as shootin’ dates from before any time *I* ever stepped aboard a passenger aircraft…
Not long ago, I was alerted to a pair of eBay auctions for vintage blueprints of “Supersonic Escape Capsules.” The blueprints, produced by the US Army Air Forces, depict models of the capsules made from plexiglas and plywood. This would be generally interesting to me, but one of the diagrams seemed to indicate that the diagrams might not be what they said they were. Instead, it looked a *lot* like an aerodynamically improved “Fat Man” atom bomb. I suspected that what was for sale were actually test or display models of early atom bomb casings, intentionally mis-described for security reasons. I managed to score both blueprints with surprisingly minimal fuss.
Upon receipt of the blueprints, my suspicion that at least one of them depicts an evolved Fat Man seems to have been misplaced. Fat Man was about 60 inches in diameter; the model is 38.5 inches in diameter, which would make for an odd scale. But the idea of a supersonic escape capsule being studied in 1946 is also odd, since the USAAF was years from having supersonic aircraft. And the configurations don’t really seem to work as escape capsules; typically such things are the entire cockpit which can break away from the aircraft, but these would make for very unfortunate cockpits for supersonic aircraft. So at the current time I can’t quite figure this one out. I’ll continue to see if I can run down info on this, but leads are few.
I have not scanned in these blueprints yet. They’ve been folded up longer than most of the people reading this have been alive, so it’ll take a good long time to flatten them out and make them safe for scanning. But I’ve taken some photos, which I’ve made available in full rez in a ZIP archive for all of my APR Patreon patrons. The APR Patreon page is HERE. If you want to help preserve and make available obscure aerospace history items such as these, please consider contributing to the APR Patreon. For as little as $0.75/month, you can help out, plus gain access to a bunch of aerospace “rewards” like these. You can also help out by helping to spread the word.
The first “escape capsule” on a quite good vintage blueprint. The resemblance to “Fat Man” is obvious… but likely dubious. It’s a close match to the Davy Crockett warhead from a decade later.
The second “escape capsule,” on a larger and more badly faded blueprint.
One of the problems with photographing large format blueprints is the almost inevitable groupies. Cats like paper. Cats *love* crinkly paper. And 70-year-old vellum blueprints are the crinkliest of crinkly paper. Fortunately, no damage done.
Currently up on eBay is an original watercolor illustration of a McDonnell-Douglas cargo plane concept. Details are lean, but it looks like it dates from the 1980’s.
A multibody design make sense for heavy cargo lifters. By spreading the load across the wing, rather than suspending it from a single point, the wing is stressed considerably less. Of course, drag is noticeably increased and runways need to be wider.
This particular design seems a little odd… especially with the leading edge of the wing. Unless the aft fuselage is taller than the forward fuselage, or the wing is tilted up at a substantial angle of incidence, then the leading edge of the wing should be submerged into the upper fuselage, as the trailing edge is. Artistic oversight?
Back in the day – and almost certainly “the day” was “every single moment from the beginning through now to the end” – Lockheed kept files on what the competition was doing. Some of these files included publicly available info on competitors aircraft. And sometimes it was information that was classified, and that by all rights Lockheed probably shouldn’t have been aware of. But it only made good sense to collect all the intelligence they could. Some of this stuff has started to leak out. Not via Wikileaks… but via eBay. One seller has a number of single-page sheets providing summary data on aircraft from the 1950’s. Ya gotta wonder just how big the whole file on aircraft of the time was.
Here’s the Lockheed summary file on the Martin P6M-1 SeaMaster. Fortunately the seller provided decent photos of the files.
Find yourself a bank that has been around for decades and that has had safety deposit boxes for all that time. Develop your time machine by spending yourself deeply into debt, using funds obtained from shady loan sharks and mob bosses. Go back to, oh, 1938 and pick up a few things:
Put items in the safety deposit box. Come back to the present. Sell the cheapest item, convert to gold; go *back* to the 1920’s, use gold to buy some Tommyguns, come back to the present, mow down the loan sharks and mob bosses, go *back* to the 1940’s, drop off Tommyguns at the FBI; come back to the present. Enjoy your expensive old-timey goodies debt free. Live in the knowledge that if the FBI retained the tommyguns, there just might maybe be a chance that a ballistic analysis might show that the loan sharks were gunned down with weapons that have been in the FBI lockup for 75 years.
Important note: don’t let the FBI know you have a time machine.
Th atomic bomb canvas blueprints I put on eBay several weeks back didn’t sell, but eBay keeps rolling over the auction week after week. So if you were interested but just forgot, they’re still available.
I added some to the descriptions. Hopefully the new verbiage will be a bit more enlightening.
Less than a day left on these ebay auctions. Given the dearth of bids and watchers, it looks like not only will you be able to get them cheap, this’ll be your *only* chance to get them.
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A while back I took a stab at printing cyanotype blueprints on canvas (the kind used by artists for painting on). After a rough start, I managed to get the process to work pretty well. It’s more complex and substantially more expensive than cyanotype printing on vellum paper, so I don’t know if I’ll make canvas blueprints available for regular sale like the paper versions. Still, I’ve put the first three successes on ebay if anyone is interested:
A while back I took a stab at printing cyanotype blueprints on canvas (the kind used by artists for painting on). After a rough start, I managed to get the process to work pretty well. It’s more complex and substantially more expensive than cyanotype printing on vellum paper, so I don’t know if I’ll make canvas blueprints available for regular sale like the paper versions. Still, I’ve put the first three successes on ebay if anyone is interested: