Throwing My 32" Into the Ring

daverep

Active Member
Alright...I guess it's time for me to get my thread going.

My apologies for all of the pics at the start. I've been working on this for a few months now.

To start off, I gotta thank joewhite for his cutting plans and for all of the help and insight he's given me thus far. Also a huge thanks to J. Maruska, the drawings he did are fantastic reference to this build.

Both sets of plans (Joe's & Maruska's) were designed for laser cutting and I have to say, I REALLY wish I had access to one of those. I'm cutting everything by hand and have had a lot of trial & error. However, things have worked out pretty well. Well, so far at least. The "human factor" in cutting has caused some issues that I've had to fix and still need to fix in some places.

Okay, now for the build.
First pics are of Joe's cutting plans. I cut them out and traced them onto two sheets of .06 styrene.
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And here are the two halves completely cut out. They had some issues that I had and had to go in and later fix.
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Next the ribs. I gotta' say that was tedious cutting them out by hand. I literally doubled the amount Joe had in his drawing as I remember reading on another post by Frank that when they did the MR Falcon, the spacing they used was 2" due to the hull warping. So, I figured it wouldn't hurt. Once they were cut out, I sanded them down so they would all match better.
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Right off the bat, I screwed up and attached them first instead of working on the center ring. I though that I could use them to create that circle. Nope...the "human factor" came in and found some of the ribs were too short. Not thinking, I had trimmed them down to match. So, when I built the ring, I attached shims so the ones that didn't quite reach the ring would do so. However, when did that, I noticed that it made that whole part much stronger, so I continued the shims all the way around on both the top and the bottom.
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Instead of going ahead and skinning the halves, I had thought about making some of the hull structures, jaw boxes, boxes underneath, so that they would be attached first and the skin cut around them. This is how Joe had figured on doing the docking tunnels. So, that was my first (and current) task.

He created some ribs for the tunnels.
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I decided to build a little bit of support for them so that they are squared and aligned as well as giving a bit of support for the top & sides. But first, I had to remove some of my ribbing in order to get in there.
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The above pic shows one of my errors in cutting this area out. I'll have to plug that up later. Not sure how I accomplished screwing this up. :angry

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I realized that I had probably over-designed the understructure, so I simplified it a bit.
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I'm pretty sure this will work, so this morning I went ahead and glued everything together.
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Dry fitted the top and sides...
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And sat the structure into it's place.
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So, this is where I am this morning. I think this is going to work. So, I'm going to see if I can get the rest of them finished today. I'm not going to permanently attach them until I'm 100% sure it's going to work. In theory, it should...but since I'm cutting these parts by hand, who knows what may happen. :lol

Thanks for checking it out!
Dave
 
As I will, Good start Dave I'll eventually get to doing one of these its's on my model bucket list before I kick the bucket :lol.
 
Thanks everyone! Still being pretty new to all of this, it means a lot coming from everyone.

Didn't get as much accomplished as I would have wanted...my wife is now sick with the same cold that I have, but it looks like it hit her much harder, so I had to do the domestic thing today...kids...laundry...dishes.

I've finished both top docking tunnels.
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If you're wondering...yes. I'm building this at our kitchen table. Unfortunately I have no where else. I can tell you that even though I'm building on the table, I'm keeping my part of the table cleaner than the rest of my family! :lol

So at this point, I'm trying to decide whether to continue with the lower docking tunnels or actually put the equator strip in. I think I may have to do that in order to work on the lower tunnels.

Off to stare at this thing for a little while and make a decision. Thanks again everyone for the compliments! They are definitely MUCH appreciated!

Dave
 
Thanks again everyone...all of the comments are helping to boost my confidence ever so slightly that I may actually pull this off! :lol

Hopefully I didn't just jinx myself for saying that!

While I'm at lunch, I wanted to post a quick update from last night...I got the equator walls put in.

First pics are the braces for the wall. I might have gone a bit much with the amount of braces, but I figured to be safe than sorry. I'm not too worried about weight as I'm probably going to build some landing gear and years ago I bought one of the Code3 Falcons (couldn't afford the MR verson) and they made a pretty functional stand for it and might replicate something similar. So, I'm wasn't too worried about adding too many braces for weight issues.

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You'll notice in the top pic that I didn't put any bracing for the engine. I'm actually not too sure what I'm going to do there yet. I was thinking of going the traditional LED route with the wall, but I remember seeing, somewhere, that someone had used a strip of lighted material. I may have to research that a bit unless someone know's what I'm talking about.

Bottom pic shows the 1/2" spacing from the edge plus the .06 added in to maintain the half-inch space for the donor parts.

Next are pics of the wall temped in. I didn't want to attach it just yet JUST in case I've screwed something up.
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And the top half sitting on top.
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So the halves are taped together and I'll work on the bottom docking tunnels next. Then I'll work on the mandible walls. I know the inner mandible walls are inset a bit, but anyone know exactly how much?

So there she sits...it's starting to look like something now. There are a few issues to work out, but some I think will be hidden by the hull and the plating.

Thanks again everyone! And thanks for looking!!
Dave
 
It's coming together very well. I can't wait to get my hands on some styrene... ply-wood and foam can get a bit messy! :)
 
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