And at least 3 more designs need to be added to the little zoo here. Sigh…
There is not only modeling to be done, but some tinkering for rendering purposes. The tip of the Orion’s pointy nose seems to vanish.
Jan 152009
Jan 132009
From Fantastic Plastic models…
Jan 032009
Delivered today were the printed parts for the Rockwell “Silent Night” stealth attack plane. The resin is good, but there’s a lot of surface roughness (“jaggies”) produced by the resolution limits of the 3D printer to be removed. Still, the parts fit, and test sanding of the underside of one of the wings went off without a hitch. This’ll be a pretty spiffy model once completed.
Dec 222008
The first model I did for Fantastic Plastic back in 2004 was the British Avro 730 bomber in 1/144 scale. Last year I was asked to re-visit the model. I completely rescribed it, added cockpit, landing gear and bomb bay details, and just generally improved the hell out of it. The first time ’round, my skills were a little rusty; the new version is a great improvement. It is now available for purcahse from Fantastic Plastic.
Dec 222008
PTM folded up shop *years* ago. There was a brief revival 3 or so years back, when I released the Lockheed lifting body CEV model; but other than that, my model work has been done under contract (largely to Fantastic Plastic).
I have decided to bring PTM back. PTM was, in it’s day, a provider of simple and (for garage resin kits) relatively *cheap* model kits. I am going to largely stick with that… minimum parts count, minimal price (which, since they are garage kits, will still be more expensive than injection molded kits). It won’t be competition for FP… I am going to either do kits that have been rejected by FP, or are outside of FP’s baliwick, or were previous PTM kits. One of the SICBM “Midgetman” Hard Mobile Launchers, for example. The Lockheed CEV. The X-20. A few conversion kits for regular injection mold kits… a new lower half for the Monogram 1/72 X-15 to produce a very different bird, for example. Possibly the nuclear engines for the X-6 to fit to the 1/72 B-36 kit. The early Jupiter IRBM-launching submarine concept.
Feel free to post suggestions.
Dec 212008
The end of my part of the Space Park story. The actual 3-D printed parts were shipped to me, I cleaned ’em up (the tech isn’t *quite* there yet to make baby-ass smoth parts straight out of the printer cost effectively), and have shipped them off to Fantastic Plastic. FP will have them cast and will market them.
Below is a photo of the parts ready for shipment to FP. There is one more part not shown…a tiny little antenna cluster for the nose. The kit should be pretty easy to assemble.
Dec 122008
As a followup to yestedays post, here’re the helicopter models on display at the Hiller aerospace museum, back in ’04. These two were STORC(Self-ferrying Trans Ocean Rotary-wing Crane) concepts, which were choppers with turbojets at the rotortips. On the ground, one of the rotors could be flipped so that both rotors faced the same way… turning them into wings. This would allow efficient long-distance ferry flight. At the other end, the rotor could be turned back around, restoring the vehicle into a helicopter. This procedure could not be accomplished in flight, only on the ground with the rotors stopped. On the whole this was a pretty spiffy idea, but rotor-tip turbojets tended to have problems (being squished by centrifugal force really doesn’t help a mechanism with lots of moving parts).
Dec 102008
Fantastic Plastic has just released a model kit that I made the master parts for: the Lenticular ReEntry Vehicle. This is a 1/72 scale resin replica of a 1962 North American Aviation concept for a disk-shaped “space bomber.”
The model comes with a detailed weapons bay, four bombs and the little “shuttlepod” that was to be used to transport the bombs out of the weapons bay and either onto the outer surface of the bomber or to a separate orbiting weapons depot.
Dec 082008
Dec 062008
<>An early 1960’s Convair display model for an SST based on the generic NASA SCAT-16 configuration. From the Jay Miller archive.
What purpose was to be served by having the flight crew split up under separate cockpit canopies, I’ve no idea.