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Space shuttle endeavour model3/28/2024 ![]() Notice I am using a lot of the tiger grip goo all around the seams of the inner deck assembly. Here are the sides being adhered to the deck. I was afraid I was going to glue a piece on the wrong side, or upside down, or both! You can see that I've added more balsa wood braces around the edges for support, and labeled each side and piece. ![]() Now I'm preparing to glue the sides around the deck. Here is the port side SRB blast chamber coming together: I just hope the Plastruct bond with the acrylic will be strong enough to support the weight of the heavy die-cast metal shuttle stack! :pray:/>/>/>/> This would have been much harder to do had I completely assembled the blast chambers first. I went ahead and glued the pieces the SRB's sit on onto each blast chamber wall. Jumping back into it, it was time to assemble the SRB blast chamber panels. I'm thinking I can knock this build out pretty fast. You can see that the forward and aft sides are a bit long, that's because these parts were originally intended to be cut from the 3mm sheet. I'm using balsa wood affixed with Tiger grip goop to help bolster the thin 1.5mm parts to the acrylic. These assemblies will eventually be glued inside of the SRB blast chambers.Īnd this is as far as I got tonight - gluing the panels for the SSME blast chamber to the bottom of the deck. Above you can see where I am in the process of gluing 3 of these triangle shapes together to create the part that the SRB nozzles sit on. :)/>Īfter 2 hours spent carefully peeling the protective paper off of all of the fragile acrylic parts, I can finally start building. So far, it looks like everything is going to fit together nicely. Here is a quick dry-fit of the main components. I decided to get the tail masts, SRB pipes, and rainbirds since I didn't want the tedious task of scratch-building them. Here are the rest of the 3D printed parts that I ordered from Michael Key on Shapeways. Some of the clear parts shown here still have the protective tape covering them. I had to include the blast chamber panels on this sheet since I ran out of room on the 3.0mm sheet. Here are the clear 1.5mm parts that will overlap the parts in the previous photo. I expect these details will be more visible after painting. You can't see them in the photos, but there are engraved details on the deck and side panels. I designed the basic shapes to be cut into a 3.0mm sheet of white styrene, and the overlapping details would be cut into a 1.5mm sheet of clear styrene (clear was cheaper than white at that thickness). With each side of the 3D printed MLP running at about $70 a piece, it did not make sense economically to get all 4 of his 3D-printed sides. I decided I would use Michael Key's 3D printed Shuttle MLP Side 1 and create the deck and remaining sides myself using laser-cut acrylic that I would draw in Illustrator, using scans of the Educraft MLP kit as a guide. So I have spent the last month researching the MLP, how to go about building a decent (but not perfect) representation of it, and creating drawings that would eventually become the laser-cut acrylic pieces that will make up most of the model. What do you guys think about weathering this thing? Any reason why I should not try and go about further detailing and weathering a high-end diecast model such as this? Edited Jby Hotdog So I thought I would share this with you guys and get your thoughts on how I should approach making a MLP, and see what ideas you have. ![]() I would likely get into making a hybrid of paper, wood and styrene platform just as he did, especially since the metal Bandai stack is likely too heavy for a MLP made of paper alone. My other option is to get the Educraft paper MLP that Manfred has been using as the basis for his STS-6 build. Obviously, this would be a much more expensive route than the approach crowe-t used, so I will have to consider that. This might look better than the sandstone-printed MLP already available for the Bandai shuttle here. I could use 3D printed parts from Shapeways for the tail masts and the front of the MLP and scratch-build the rest. Then I thought perhaps I could scratch-build something that fits on top of the Bandai base (so I can still utilize the LED spotlights). My first thought was to just get the Revell stack and use the kit MLP as my base like crowe-t did. I'm thinking something along the lines of what crowe-t did with his Discovery stack. So, I want to build a MLP for it, or at least some sort of realistic representation of an MLP. I love the shuttle stack, but I'm not too thrilled about the base that it sits on (even though it has LED spotlights). Kinda nice for me to have right now, since I can't work on any of my shuttle builds during the ongoing remodeling of my house. So I finally broke down and shelled out the $$$ to get the magnificently-awesome Bandai Space Shuttle Endeavour (click the link for more pics).
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