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Playing in the Sandbox Group Build Sept 1, 2024 - Jn 1, 2025

What is on your bench right now ? Share a picture :)


Martinnfb

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1 hour ago, BlrwestSiR said:

Come on by! We're doing a double batch so should be plenty for everyone.

Thanks for the invitation, I'm quite honoured, but I have to cook for my wife now. It will be Salmon and Peto along a Salsa made from grilled cherry tomatoes which then is added with fresh Passion fruit and a little brown sugar to caramelize a little. Accompanied by some Ebly (a kind of sun wheat) which is roasted, then cooked with white wine and then get Parmesan and Estragon added. 
I will raise my glass to you, when finished :wine:.

Cheers Rob

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Not a physical bench, but rather the virtual one ...

A bit of background. In 2015, Lone Star Models released a  1/32 kit of the Travel air Mystery Ship, in resin. Of course, I jumped on it, and started it in earnest. But, even if the kit is worth it for the extensive decal sheet alone (yeah, I know, a bit steep for a decal sheet, but who has not already spent too much on some AM for a kit :rolleyes: ?), my expectations soon came to a crash-landing.

The kit was wrong in many areas. The most noticeable error is the shape of the fuselage. The Mystery Ship was initially designed around an in-line 300 Hp engine. When the engine project flopped, the designers, Burnham and Rawdon, who had initiated the design without their boss Walter Beech knowing it, fell back on a bulky Wright J6-9 radial - at that time Travel Air had just been integrated into the giant Curtiss-Wright corporation, in the 1929 pre-Black Thursday frenzy of risky leveraged acquisitions and consolidations.

With the big  Wright J6-9, the smoothly-faired, thin, fuselage designed around an in-line 6 had to be adapted by adding side bulges (a bit like the revamped battleships of the era) to recover an aerodynamic shape. The bulges started aft the engine mount/firewall, and came to the original fuselage shape at about the level of the cockpit headrest/wing trailing edge. This resulted in a distinctive kink of the fuselage line, when viewed from the top or rear.

LSM have designed theit kit with a continuous, straight line, which is wrong for the Mystery Ship (but not necessarily so for the Texaco ship). So it had to be redone. Plus the wing profile was wrong, too thin to fit the wing-stubs, and definitely not like the RAF-34 airfoil that was used, with its flat underwing. I started modifying the left fuselage by building up the bulge with Milliput, then sanding and thinning the inside to get a thinner shell that would accomodate the (missing) tubular structure of the cockpit :(

As the work was frankly tedious, I had the idea of redesigning the fuselage and wings in 3D on Solidworks, for subsequent 3D-printing.

I did all this work, plus also a correct Wright J6-9 engine, and a correct windscreen, and modified stabs, rudder, and elevators ...

Then it stalled because I could not, at that time, print the fuselage to its designed specs with an FDM 3D-printer. And then I moved to Portugal, when my PC with Solidworks was in the office in France, and, when I was there, I had no time to do 3D-design work :(

Anyway, fast-forward to end-2020. I had the idea to rapatriate the PC to Portugal, and also acquired an EPAX 3D DLP printer, which could do what the Anycubic Photon, with its "wobble" on the Z-axis, could probably not do, i.e. print the fuselages and wings (only just in size, btw)

The saying is that, once one knows how to ride a bicycle, it is forever ... Well, not so much with Solidworks ! The re-learning curve was steep !

And here I am, now, with a new part designed for 3d-printing, i.e. a complete cokpit ! It will maybe be tougher to paint, but it beats gluing tiny plastic rods together, well at least that's what I hope.

And this is what is on my virtual bench now (renderings so far) :

i-vtGDmb8-600x397.png

 

i-SthbJ6p-600x434.png i-qzTdJVt-389x450.png

 

i-GcgJVg7-600x366.png

 

i-RQShD8G-600x311.png

Btw, here are the renderings for the Wright engine, sans exhaust stubs. I had it (successfully) printed outside in a few examples at the time.

i-WWMJqZs-405x450.png i-LX9ZMQL-600x536.png i-HfDVtcX-600x487.png

I'll start a WiP thread soon, after I have finished my P11c, however.

Hubert

 

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