So, like I was saying a year and a half ago…

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…