LEM Greebles turned out reasonably OK. I have to scale them down by 75% from my model to make them fit. A miscalculation of scale on my part.
The problem, at this scale it's hitting the detail limit with a 0.4mm nozzle. I tried printing vertically to take advantage of 0.5mm layer height but it wasn't an improvement.
LEMings
If only it was this easy in the real space program.
As they are, they will look fine in place and painted.
Side Frame Greeblies
Next set of greeblies I want to tackle are the tanks that sit at either side of the Eagle walkways, inside the frame.
Tank greeblies inside the frame structure.
Fusion 360 to the rescue. It looks like a shelf with a number of fuel tanks connected by pipework, with what could be a lathe thrown in. The original looks like it has different diameters of pipework but I'm at the limit of what I can expect to print reliably.
Fusion 360 - Making the side greebles
This took a number of test prints. One had the top pipes too high and had to be bent to fit inside the frame. And the next version I made included two holes I can glue short pieces of filament into, as a key....because printing them in two halves works better.
Slic3r - We cut it into two halves to print.
The underside showing the key holes
Printing the first layer
Here's one I made earlier
Need to add key holes - to help glue them correctly
It works Jeeves!
Cockpit Painting
Three layers of primer and sanding later. I got the bulk of the layers lines removed except for the window areas which will have acetate in them.
The Eagle used a lot of parts from contemporary UK model kits in it's time. The Apollo Saturn V kits saw use on the Millennium Falcon and also the Eagle. The parts I'm looking at today would have been sourced from the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) provided in the 1/144 scale Airfix Saturn V model kit.
The spine area featured these LEM parts as separate half shells. I've seen different arrangements of these parts on different models, some Eagles built in later shows did have different locations (one seen had none at all).
Lunar Lander Parts - two positioned near cockpit
Lunar Lander Parts - In this drawing, at opposite ends.
In this diagram, to rear pieces near the engine.
This model has three on the forward section and the most common.
At this scale, the length of the LEM part should be approx. 2.5mm. We've managed to remix a low poly model to look like the original part.
The main engine bells of the Eagle Transporter are shiny chrome. For the official MPC kit, a real aluminium metal kit of engine parts was available as an extra. I was hoping to get one before prices went ballistic (was 49 UKP, now 100 to 200+).
Alclad (left), Gloss Black surface (right)
We can do something pretty good, the prints for the engine bells turned out pretty good, and while I could spend more time sanding them smooth I thought a little surface texture would look ok for these parts. I've seen engineering drawings of Saturn V F1 engines and they increase the surface area this way to provide cooling.
The plan was to start with the usual bodywork primer I'd used on the Eagle landing pods, then a fine grey surface primer. A Black Gloss to build up a good surface shine onto which we airbrush the metal finish, which will be Alclad II Chrome lacquer.
Small thruster with Hycote Filler Primer
Then a fine Tamiya matt grey primer, this dries super fast. Perfect for detailed models.
After Tamiya Gray Primer
For painting metal parts we added to our stock of paints:
Vallejo Natural Steel
Vallejo Bright Bronze (for burnishing effects)
Vallejo Violet (to layer with the above)
Rub'n Buff Silver Leaf
Alclad II Chrome
I'm almost too excited
Alclad should be used in the airbrush neat, no thinning. It dries into a nice shiny surface and a fast dry time too. But the surface is everything. If you've done any 3D modelling work, imagine this as specular layer.
Engine bell with Gloss Black finish ready for airbrushing Alclad
Experimental: Control Piece - No gloss surface, Natural Steel
Glass surface, Alcad finish
We got a good result we can improve for future builds by spending a little more time on surface finish, sanding. I'm not using a terribly expensive airbrush, some ABEST clone set to 1.5 bar pressure (about 21 PSI).
I almost forgot the engine diffusers, these fit inside the engine bells and I want to add a burned, carbonised finish to these, and add some burnishing effects to the bells. Which I'll cover later.
Engine diffusers getting glossed over
2001 - A Space Odyssey - 50th Anniversary
While I'm in the process of painting and finishing, I've got the next classic ship build on the printer, which is certainly the biggest, at an expected 115 cm in length.
Here's a photo of some of the recent parts being test fitted.
Printed slooowly at 0.05mm layer height (ultra resolution)
In 1975, a great, and yet awful, sci-fi series started showing on British television. Space 1999 (wiki). The stories made little to no sense and physics was magic; a nuclear explosion blasts the Moon out of orbit sending the Moon and the inhabitants of Moon base Alpha on an alien planet-of-the-week discovery tour of the universe. Yes, physics.
The star of the show was the 2001 influenced model work (very much like the Moonbus). And the hero ships in the form of the multi-purpose Eagle Transporters.
For reference: a built MPC Round 2 Kit (22" half studio scale)
There were many kit versions around 1975 onwards, made by MPC who had the license, they were not detailed but inexpensive and I built all of them. And rebuilt a few times. The Eagle is in my top 5 vehicle designs and building a large scale one has always been on my bucket list. I want to build a full 44" studio scale but before I do that it's time to practice with something half that scale.
Thanks to the magic of 3D printing we can. 3D printing with FDM style printers leave layering artefacts which spoil the finish. But with enough graft, sanding, filing and painting, you can get amazing results as per the Liberator model.
I had a model to print in mind from Thingiverse but it would need a lot of re-working to get a print good enough to work with. I didn't even know if it could print the cockpit to any decent degree. So I decided to try a test print of the cockpit. If it didn't work out, I wasn't going to try. As it turned out, the cockpit was the easiest part to print.
Source Material
I have a great book about the restoration of an original Eagle hero ship from the TV show. It's called "Modelling the Eagle" by Mike Reccia (ISBN-13: 978-0993032059). It also covers work done on bringing the MPC Round 2 kit into production. This was a great personal reference.
This book became my "oracle" on how the TV show Eagles were put together, and how I might best remix the model I had to work with.
I have no idea how he printed this as good as the above looked. The model files are full of gaps and floating parts due to thin or no supports as I discovered.
The model files still contained all the sub-objects which meant it was possible to split off parts using Autodesk Meshmixer (a free and very handy tool for 3D printing).
For example, lets look at this main body section housing some superstructure, an interior corridor, airlock doors and external greebles. Pictured below.
Items like the door panel features, the com-lock panel and other parts are not needed. We did some clean-up (hence the "After" frame) but still more work was needed, removing the door frame and even (if you can spot it) an interior door that "slides" to one side.
Now, in the show, all the doors slide to the side, it's the future. This model shows how it's impossible as the door would have to slide through the side of the ship. And we even have an interior door model that would print if we didn't remove it.
This made it obvious that the province of this model was more for CGI work that printing.
And there was no support for the landing gear pods to attach to the sides. This model wouldn't go together very well. And the Thingiverse model doesn't show it assembled. No has anyone shown a completed one.
But I stuck with it as it happens to be the best most accurate Eagle on Thingiverse in terms of dimensions. Seriously, most of the other suck in terms of accuracy.
The Cockpit Test Print
The Eagle cockpit was make or break. It had a lot of curves and raised sections. It would need to be printed 'nose up'.
Using very fine layer details, I printed this at 20% infill but 0.05mm layer height (ultra-detail for a Prusa i3 Mk2).
In retrospect, I should have sliced this part horizontally near the back wall of the cockpit. I want to come back to this later and hollow out the cockpit to take lights. But this will be a good test piece even if it won't be on the final model.
The Spine
The spine was the longest part which I was troubled about due to bridging. The STL supplied it in two parts, due to wobble (the printer managed to spit out a plastic 'bogie' which caught the nozzle causing it to move every pass) it failed several hours in. Results below.
I ended up splitting it into four pieces and printed one at a time. Note where it's been sliced at the bottom.
I use superglue, cyanoacetate (cyao), to bond everything, sometimes Gorilla glue. But superglue works best for me unless I need a longer work time in which case Gorilla glue. It all works well with PLA and ABS. The spine hasn't come apart yet and it's taking a lot of weight.
The Cages
These would be printed separately from the internal greebles and interior compartment, the model has everything mashed together. There were may problems with these parts; the greebles were not accurate (I wonder if this was on purpose to make it legally distinct?) and there was no support for the landing pods where the legs attach. How the legs attach will have to be remodelled and the greebles removed.
Another session in Autodesk Meshmixer finally pulled everything apart.
The cages could now be sliced for printing. Different versions and orientations were tried.
45 Degree Rule
FDM printers work by layering a round cross-section on-top of the previous, the maximum offset you can efficiently use is 45 degrees. After that you're relying on hand crafted settings, luck, printer calibration, cooling...ugh. But the general rule of thumb is try not to print sections that overhang by more than a 45 degree angle. So the part I sliced and printed below....
Looked terrible. It was gloopy and bridging randomly worked. It was so bad it went right into the waste pile.
This orientation was better.
This created stringing and more work, so not used.
And this was an attempt at the centre cage section using custom supports generated by Meshmixer.
I don't recommend this. While it work and looked like a hairy mess after printing (nearly half of the supports failed). It did produce a good piece after some cleaning up.
The best orientation was the one in the next screenshot, in terms of clean-up and assembly. All of the modified files will be made available at the end of the project.
The interior compartment is just a box, I added sections to take connectors from the leg pods.
The leg pod files had this protrusion built into the model, this would make it had to sand and finish, so this was modified it to have the connector as a separate piece.
With these parts, the front end of the Eagle started to take shape.
The spine fully glued, and all 4 leg pods printed.
Tanks printed with the frame section down but with support material added.
Lets assembled and painting started.
The passenger pod need a lot of clean-up to remove surface details and door sections that appeared to float over voids that wouldn't print well. Again, Meshmixer with it's Analysis mode was used.
Printed in three sections, left, right and middle, to glue together. If I revisit this, I'll create a hollow pod with an interior.
I'm at the point where I've printed the cages, spine, cockpit, engine bells, leg pods and the passenger module. Most of the major parts. Allowing a test fit held together using cable ties.
Lot of sanding to do on the engine tanks and forward cage, the cockpit too. But I might reprint this after modification.
I want to talk about the sanding, priming and paint in the next post. This covers about a month of work. I actually miss sanding the little pods. Next time no surface decals, and just cut features from sheets of styrene.
Until then...
I started this blog with a quote, which comes from the Comic Strip Presents episode - A Fistful of Travellers Cheques.
