I've been wanting one of these for a while, so I decided to hop in and start a build as well. I've got one last kit arriving on Monday and I'll have all the kit parts I need.
In the mean time I decided to get going on the styrene annuli that surround the truck rims. I knew that I wanted to cut these from styrene that was conformed to the spherical shape but I didn't want to go to the effort of making a little vac forming setup, so I decided to just build a little wooden frame to hold the styrene sheet, warm the sheet carefully with a heat gun, and then pull the frame over a 6-inch glass globe lighting fixture. I did a test with 0.02"-thick (0.5mm) styrene and could see that the slight thinning from the stretching meant that 0.03"-thick (0.75mm) sheet was the way to go here.
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With the sheet conformed to the proper spherical shape I marked off one or two great circles to form the guides for the annuli centers and for the 7.8-mm gaps to be cut later on. Given the limitations of the size of the Evergreen sheets I used I could only get a spherical draw large enough to cut two annuli from each draw. I'll use the in-between scrap to cut some of the other rectangular pieces that are needed. Based on builds in other threads I measured off arcs along the sphere of 55.5mm and 32mm for the outer and inner annuli diameters, respectively. Then used a compass to mark off the annuli on the draw for cutting.
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I had thought about having the annuli laser cut, but decided that I could just hand cut them and sand to shape neatly enough to work.
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I really cannot recommend strongly enough how much nicer it is to have these stryene pieces cut from sheet that conforms to the underlying sphere. And it's not at all hard to do, even without a vac forming setup. That's why I posted this here, so others may benefit from seeing this easy alternative technique...
Dan