18 August 2017

One small step back in time

I was born during the Apollo lunar missions and grew up devouring science fiction from authors like Arthur C Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Ray Bradbury.  Manned space exploration and even space tourism was just around the corner.

But it was not to be.  Skylab and the space shuttle missions never left low Earth orbit (LEO).  The international space station orbits at an altitude of about 400km, the same distance as a drive from Auckland to Napier.  Nobody has been back to the Moon since 1972.

Lately, there has been a huge resurgence in interest to send manned missions to the Moon and Mars but until then we can look back on the truly amazing achievements of the American space program of the 60's and 70's.

With that in mind, I decided to spend some dark winter evenings building a 1:144 scale kit model of the Saturn V rocket.  There are plenty of blogs out there about assembling the kits so I'll just cover the things that I did slightly differently or stuffed up (for giggles).





This one is made by Revell, and required quite a bit of filler to get things smooth enough for a spray paint finish in my home made spray booth. 


  
I initially tried using a cheap air brush and some thinned Tamiya paint but I gave up and re-coated the main body with a can of white spray paint.

Painting the white was easy, but no amount of care with masking stopped the black Tamiya paint from bleeding through, so again this was abandoned in favor of a can of acrylic.



I used to use an air brush all the time at work (as a part time architectural model maker) but clearly I have lost the knack - too much thinner I think.

For the lunar lander, I wanted to display this along side the rocket for scale so I glued a small rare earth magnet to the underside... 



...and another one under the base.



Note the polarity of the magnet is carefully marked prior to gluing to ensure the lander points the right way when sitting on the base.







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