drawings – Page 5 – The Unwanted Blog

Well, that was less than fun

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Jun 192022

There is a bit of a thrill in the last moments of any auction. I suppose it’s like gambling or sportsball-watching, neither of which I’m into, but I guess there is a similar result. Anyway, this afternoon saw the end of an Ebay listing for a lot of McDonnell manned lifting body + ASSET documentation & blueprints; this is exactly the sort of thing the APR Patreon/Subscription was created for. Having seen such auctions go for *stupid* sums in the past, I expected the same here, so I had a group of people together to crowdfund it. I was prepared, with crowdfund backing, to bid a *stupid* amount for it. And in fact I did bid a *stupid* amount (well above what I’d gathered via crowdfunding) in the last few seconds. Fortunately, the final cost was not so tragically high, so the funders only got charged a smidgeon and my tragically over-stretched credit card didn’t get demolished.

Still, those last few moments were troublesome. Because as it turns out, my cardiopulmonary system ain’t over the Pinko Pox yet, and my system *really* didn’t like that at all. That aspect of the exercise sucked.

But hey, manned lifting body. Woo.

Large format scans coming in…

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Apr 132022

The large format rocket & submarine scans I mentioned HERE are starting to come in. The first ~60 scans clock in at a total of about 1 gigabyte… the remaining forty – scanned, but not yet sent to me – total something like 23 gigabytes. Giant full-color blueprints. Woo.

For a limited time, if you would like copies of these scans, the whole batch is $175. If interested, send me an email:

A lot of large format scans

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Apr 072022

I just dropped off at the print shop a little over one hundred large format prints for scanning. I usually do this in small handfuls, so this is a new approach. It’s also an expensive approach. In that pile of prints are just over 50 diagrams of early-ish rockets/space launch vehicles, all from the same source; the other fifty-ish are something new: submarines. American subs from the early days to a few decades ago; some are commercial diagrams, but most are official blueprints depicting a wide range of submarines.

Following receipt of the scans, there will follow a long process of going through them and trying to figure out what to do with them all. Some will go into the monthly rewards catalog; some will perhaps go into the “Drawings and documents” catalog, and some, like the subs, will go into a brand-new catalog. A lot of them will *not* be distributed that way, since they are commercial items. Almost all will require a lot of cleanup, a heart-breakingly time consuming process sometimes. A lot of expense and effort, right when I’m broke and busy. So, always on the lookout for a way to make a nickel, here’s what I can do: if the idea of 50 rocket diagrams and 50 submarine diagrams (some of them will be *very* large) sounds interesting to you, I will make them available as a sight-unseen lot for $175 for anyone who responds via the email address below. I don’t know for sure how long the scanning process will take; probably more than a week. At the end of that time I will have a massive block of data uploaded to Dropbox: I’m handwaving a guess of around ten gigabytes. So if you’re interested in the diagrams, or you just want to help a feller out with this rather niche activity (preserving aerospace and now submarine history), send me an email, and when the scans are available I will send out PayPal requests.

A *few* of the submarine diagrams may be deleted prior to being sent out. The ones with the rather interesting “distribute these further and the FBI will come and say howdy” notifications. I’ve seen one such; it was not included in this batch. I didn’t see that on any in this batch, but I will look closer when I can see them digitally.

March 2022 APR Rewards

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Mar 312022

I’ve just made the March 2022 rewards available for APR Patrons and Subscribers. This latest package includes:

Art: A poster of the 1990’s German Sanger II two-stage-to-orbit spaceplane

Document: Bell-Boeing “Pointer” brochure… full color brochure describing the proposed tiltrotor UAV

Document: Cessna EV-37E STOL: 1964 presentation on battlefield recon/surveillance version of the T-37

Document: History of the Juno Cluster System: conference paper on the early satellite launching system

CAD diagram: work-in-progress layout of the Aerocon Wingship. General arrangement diagram with brief description of how much trouble I have to go through sometimes…

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.

Compass Cope/B-58A

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Mar 302022

The two aircraft are unrelated, apart from the fact that I have uploaded scans of each to the 2022-03 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for $4 and up patrons/Subscribers. The first is a brief magazine writeup showing illustrations of the Boeing and Ryan designs for the Compass Cope unmanned recon vehicles from the early 1970s; both of these would end up actually being built, though not quite in the configurations shown in the concept art. The second is a Convair inboard profile/plan view of the B-58A bomber, because why not.

The full-rez scans are, again, available to $4 and pup Patrons/Subscribers. 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.

Rotational Research Facility

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Mar 282022

A few months ago I was contacted via email by someone looking for information on the North American Aviation “Rotational Research Facility” built in the 1960’s. This was – kinda – an “artificial gravity space station” built on the ground, designed for long duration human testing. Obviously it would not test human reactions to fractional-G environments, since it started at 1 G and went up from there, but it would test responses to Coriolis effects and the like. When I was contacted, I had nothing on it other than a vague recollection of the concept. Thanks to eBay I recently acquired a book that had a short description of the facility, from before it was built. If that was *you* who asked about it, let me know. If it wasn’t you, but you have more information on it, let me know. Google turns up very little on the RRF apart from a few newspaper articles. The whole thing seems to have been memory-holed; perhaps the name changed before it was built.

Recent ebay acquisitions

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Mar 062022

A few more items I’ve recently paid for that will appear on the APR Patreon/Monthly Historical Documents Program catalog:

1) General Dynamics report “Technical Proposal for Advanced Exhaust Nozzle System Concepts,” 1977 designs for advanced fighters

2) “NASA Aeronautics,” 1974

3) NASA Facts – “The Jupiter Pioneers”

4) “Cessna EV-37E STOL” report, 1964

5) Cessna 407A: report on the proposed but unbuilt 407A transport derivative of the T-37

6) Cessna AT-37E STOL: report on attack variant

7) Cessna YAT-37D counter-insurgency airplane report

Also purchased were a large number of vintage “Space World,” “Aviation News” and “Interavia” magazines for research and “Extras” purposes.

EA-6B diagram

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Mar 022022

I got the gigantic EA-6B diagram scanned. This was done without chopping up the original paper; but the end result is a nearly two gigabyte file. Manipulating it was a challenge, requiring sometimes five or more minutes to carry out a single command, but:

1)I was able to chop it up into three half-scale sections

2) I was able to scale down the whole thing to a single 48% scale version that I was able to convert to grayscale and clean up. I present a vastly smallerized version of the original color scan and the grayscale cleaned version, together with a full-scale crop of the refueling probe from the ~48% version. The intent here is to include a half-scale version in a future APR Patreon/Subscription rewards voting-catalog. The two-gig full rez? Not quite sure what to do about that yet. i will probably attempt to convert it to grayscale and clean it up for archival purposes, but at nearly 60,000 pixels wide, it’s just simply *huge.*

That’s a big sheet of paper

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Feb 262022

A recent acquisition is this Grumman general arrangement diagram of the EA-6B “Prowler” electronic warfare aircraft. It’s about three feet wide and fifteen feet long, and has been stored folded for many decades. In order to scan it, it needed to be converted from “folded” to “rolled,” otherwise it won’t feed through the scanner. This is not a problem; there are several techniques that will safely flatten out old, brittle, folded paper like this. Some people like to iron paper; my own preference, visible here, is to hang the sheet in a bathroom and run a good hot shower. The paper is permitted to get slightly damp; this softens the paper and undoes the decades of folding. The paper is then rolled around a cardboard mailing tube. The end result is that the paper goes from complex curvature to simple curvature, and feeds smoothly through a large format scanner. The sheet has undergone the flattening process, with scanning to occur soon.

In this case, though, something further and dire might need to be done. I don;t know yet whether the scanning company can scan something this long, and at 300 DPI, it’s something that can’t be processed with most image programs (there is a limit just shy of 30,000 pixels, or ten feet at 300 DPI). if they *can* scan it, then I hope to have them chop the digital image into two; if they can’t scan it… I’ll probably slice the paper into two. Not something I normally approve of, but there is a *wide* gap in the paper between views, so the diagram itself will not be at risk, and the value of having the image scanned and immortalized it probably more important than having a giant intact sheet of rolled-up paper.

Note industry standard scale reference near the bottom.

Crowdfund: Shuttle II stuff

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Feb 022022

So a lot of “Shuttle II” stuff appeared on eBay for an exorbitant price. I’m becoming increasingly leery of plunking down excessive sums for this sort of thing… not only due to my own finances and the onrushing economic meltdown, but because doing so incentivizes sellers to slap even more exorbitant prices on things. But, I put this lot before my APR patrons/subscribers as a potential crowdfunding opportunity, and enough signed on that I went ahead and purchased the lot. It should arrive early next week.

As with all my APR crowdfunds, the cost of the item is split evenly among the funders; the more funders, the lower the price per person. Each funder will receive a complete set of high-rez (300 DPI, full color… higher rez if called for) scans of the items. Typically these crowdfunded items then get sent on to appropriate archive, library or museum, though this time I’m not quite sure where they should go.

If you would be interested in signing on, send me an email . There are currently enough funders that the per-funder price is ~~~$24~~ under $14; the more sign on, the lower it’ll get. If you have a price limit noticeably lower than $14, let me know in your email. This will remain open until the stuff arrives, presumably early next week. At that point it’ll be closed and the price set.

Additionally: the box shown below, loaded with blueprints/diagrams, is somewhere in the system headed my way. It was procured sight unseen; I have high hopes. This sort of thing is made possible by the APR Patrons/Monthly Historical Documents Program subscribers. If you want to help preserve aerospace history and get in on these goodies, please consider subscribing.

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