The new tools and techniques are now operating reliably. Behold:
The wide-view photo is pretty awful; taken in bad lighting, no flash. Ah, well.
Once split apart these will be 12″x44.” Probably going to go for $35 each, plus postage. Anyone interested?
The December 2022 rewards are available for APR Patrons and Subscribers. This latest package includes:
Large Format Diagram: AWACS model diagram
Document: “Preliminary Design of a Mars Excursion Module,” 1964 conference paper, Philco
Document: “Astronauts Memorial” 2 diagrams
Document: “Patrol Reconnaissance Airplane Twin Float,” Convair brochure (via photos), 1944. Two piston engines, two turbojets
Document: “Hard Mobile Launcher,” Martin Marietta PR, two images. One photo, one artists impression
Document: “JVX Space Proposal” apparently a fragment, 1984 Bell maps of manufacturing facilities for what would become the V-22
Document: “Minimum Man In Space,” 1958 NACA memo describing proposals made to Wright Air Development Center for what would become the Mercury program
If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.
And because I forgot to post about it at the time, the November 2022 rewards were made available a month ago:
Large Format Diagram: B-50A Superfortress Model Diagram
Document: “Design Study of a One Man Lunar Transportation device,” 1964 North American Aviation conference paper on a rocket “hopper”
Document: “Project EGRESS (Emergency Global Rescue, Escape and Survival System),” 1964 Martin conference paper on ejection capsule for aerospacecraft
Document: “The Hydrogen Fueled Hypersonic Transport,” 1968 Convair conference paper
CAD Diagram: Mach 3 turbojets: Allison 700 B-2 (J89), GE YJ-93-GE-3 (cutaway), P&W J58
If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.
Ran two prints today. The second one, the 4th test of the new setup, turned out to be pretty much there with just a few minor issues. The main issue I’m looking at now is getting proper coverage of the paper. For whatever reason, the cyanotyping fluid doesn’t really like the vellum paper and you get occasional blotchiness. This was a constant problem before, and was solved largely by tossing prints that weren’t up to code. Experiments will continue…
Todays test involved mounting the UV light bar to a crude frame and just letting it run, not waving it over the print like an idjit. As you can see most of it is pretty uniform; the end of the print that was furthest from the light bar wasn’t adequately exposed. However, come the weekend two more UV lights will arrive and will extend the reach.
The learning curve this time around is going *much* faster than the first time. This should probably not be a surprise, but it’s nice to see that things are trending quickly in the correct direction.
The cyanotype setup in Utah relied on direct sunlight to process the image. But the sun is difficult to find here in Illinois in December, so I decided to give technology a try. When I originally set up in 2014, this wasn’t really an option, but Amazon now has 100 watt LED UV light bars for only $30, so I decided to try one. The result is shown below:
Clearly, it looks terrible. But I judged it to be a rampaging success: this was achieved via the crude process of simply waving it over the paper and the transparency by hand for five minutes. My goal was not a pristine cyanotype, but proof that the UV actually worked to process the image. Where it shined adequately brightly for long enough, it really did the job. So I went ahead and ordered two more. I will build a framework to hold them over the print, boxed in with reflectors. Some experimentation to dial everything in, but at this point I’m quite optimistic that a technological solution will make this work reliably repeatably.
On the other hand: the UV light bars are Chinese. So… explosions? Sudden random changes in wavelength? Burst into flames? Microphones directly to the MSS? Who knows.
Bonus wisdom: if you put a rectangular piece of paper on the floor, a cat *will* occupy it.
I am going forward with the return to cyanotyping. I’m gathering the supplies needed to rebuild the capability; learning some lessons from before, this setup should be a little better and a little bigger. I should be able to make prints 24 inches by up to 7 feet. It’s a bit of a chore and certainly an expense, but the end results will, I hope, be an improvement over what I produced before.
As before, I plan on taking commissions. I don’t care what it is… aerospace diagrams, ships, architectural diagrams, sci-fi movie prop diagrams, gay wedding cake layouts… if it can be blueprinted, I’ll do it (for a fee). So if you have anything along those lines you’d like blueprinted in the old-school cyanotype fashion (white lines on a Prussian blue background), made by hand using chemicals, sunlight and effort rather than hitting “print,” let me know. Something I will try again is blueprinting onto linen. I ran off a few back in the day; interesting, but perhaps a bit niche.
Some years ago I produced a range of cyanotype blueprints of a number of aerospace subjects. The hardware needed for this was disposed of when I left Utah at the end of 2019, so starting again seemed unlikely. However, someone has expressed interest in a special commission. Rebuilding the hardware needed will be an expensive chore, and sadly getting the large format transparencies printed looks like it will be much more difficult here than it was in Utah. Nevertheless, at this point it looks probable that I will restore that capability sometime in the next few months, assuming one further detail can be ironed out.
You can see my now-defunct catalog here:
https://www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/catalog/cyan.htm
When I get back to it I will probably focus on the larger format stuff rather than the smaller prints. I have plans on how to improve upon the prior hardware to make things work better and more efficiently. If there are any of the former large format prints you’d like to see returned to production, or you have any prints you’d like to see, let me know. And once this is up and running I plan on trying to take commissions, working with a local print shop to find customers interested in this somewhat unusual and certainly obsolete form of art.
If you have a diagram you’d like me to turn into a cyanotype, contact me. Commissions aren’t going to be restricted to aerospace subjects; naval, architectural, movie props, whatever you’ve got, so long as it *can* be blueprinted, once things are in place I should be able to do it. 
The West German Weser Flugzeugbau revealed the design of the P 23 tiltrotor in 1963. This was to be a do-everything vehicle… civil passenger transport, cargo transport, troop transport, ground attack, flying crane. It was an attractive design with one turboshaft engine at each wingtip; the rotors tilted, but the engines were fixed. The engines also provided power to two smaller fans mounted in the tail for pitch and yaw control. Sixty years later, it still looks like it would fit well in the skies of today, and look futuristic doing so.
This will take a little while to fully process.
The model AGM-86 Air Launch Cruise Missile began life as a decoy missile, sort of an updated “Quail.” it was decided that the decoy could carry a nuclear warhead, and thus provide a lot more service; this began its development as a cruise missile. As originally envisaged, it had to fit in the some bays that could hold the AGM-69 SRAM missile; this made sense in a lot of ways but strictly limited its capabilities due to the short length. Efforts to increase the range of the missile included adding a droppable belly tank and stretching the fuselage for more internal fuel volume. The latter route was chose, along with making the nose much blunter and more voluminous.Both the external tank and the fuselage stretch meant that it could not long fit in internal SRAM bays, a tradeoff that was deemed worthwhile.
The illustration below dates from mid 1976 at the latest.
The full rez scan has been uploaded to the 2022-11 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for $4 and up APR Patrons/subscribers.