So I made something

Got a new piece built for the Thunderhawk:

Got a guess what this is? Well I'll save you the trouble:

It's this:

Yup. That is one section of one engine on this bird.

Now want to know the really twisted part?

Well, yes there's the point that I have to build 2 more of these things. But beyond that point. This one part is built out of 88 separate pieces of styrene. Yup. 88 pieces.

 So now I have to make 2 more of 'em. That'll mean I have to cut out 176 pieces and assemble them. I'm sort of tempted... in a weird I want to torture myself sort of way, to actually count up the number of pieces of styrene it ultimately takes me to build this monster. And then I'll have to at least double that because I want to build a 2nd one that I can convert to go with My Chaos Forces.

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The work continues

So my progress on the Thunderbolt continues, but is somewhat halted. I need to order more molding compound. I didn't like how the first mold of the engine came out so I tried to make a better mold. While I managed to do that, I used more mold compound then I had previously planned on. So I need to order more. Otherwise I can't make the mold for the left wing and lets face it, a one-winged Thunderbolt is going to fly a whole lot worse then a two-winged version. However, I'm doubly delayed on that front because I just had to drop about $700 on a bit of a health problem. End result is nothing serious but I'm lucky I caught it when I did otherwise the doctors were concerned I'd be risking blindness in my right eye. No telling how much being blind in one eye would have slowed down my hobbying. So it will be a couple weeks till I can order more mold compound.

But that doesn't stop me from working with what I already have on hand. As previously stated I intend to use magnets in my final build to allow me to drop bombs, remove hell fire missiles and swap out fuel pods as I see fit. Well I managed to cast up one wing with magnets in it. Here's a video showing the magnets in action:

Right now it's using a single bar magnet in each pylon. The bar is magnetixed through the long axis. meaning if you look at the bar like this:

Magnet bar ===>  =============
Then the poles of the magnet are on the ends of the bar, like so:
Magnet bar ===>  =============

While this works it feels a bit flimsy and I think will put too strain on my efforts to build an alignment system into the missiles and pods. Also any alignment system I do build will be based on absolute placement of the magnets in both pieces, meaning if the magnet in the pylon is placed exactly 5.4mm from the back side of the pylon then accompanying magnet in the pylon, missile and fuel pod must also be exactly5.4mm from the back edge of the alignment system. An exacting measurement that is extremely difficult to accomplish. So what am I going to do about this? Well I think I'm going to get bar magnets that are magnetized along the long side rather then on the ends. That way it will be largely self aligning.

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So, what does 2 quarts of Resin get you?

Well, I finished the molds for various parts. Some of them worked out alright. None of them were a complete success. As you can probably guess, I've been casting up copies of the master parts I've been building the last few weeks. Some of the molds turned out pretty good, some of them not so great. In either case it's been a learning experience and now I'd like to share some of that experience with all of you. What I am saying? Learn from my mistakes. Heed my advice. See where I messed up so you don't make the same mistake if you try this sort of work.

So, first up are the molds I've made.

That is a series of 6 molds I've created over the last few months, using various approaches, materials and ideas. Here's the differences between each:

 This is actually the first 2 part mold I made. As you can see I made it so I could cast up 4 hellfire missiles at a time and one Ork twin linked big shoota. I was intending to use the shoota as the basis for my Chaos Thunderhawk Hunter guns, but alas my first attempt at a two part mold was somewhat flawed and the clay I used in the process turned into a sticky gum when I used the mold release agent on it. This mold was made using Smooth-On's Oomoo-30 Silicone Rubber kit.

This is the second attempt I made for a hell fire cast. This rubber is Smooth On's PMC-121. This rubber has the advantage of being much denser and thus stronger and more rigid and thus better at grabbing details. The down side? 16-20 hour demold time. That means once you pour the rubber, it's a day until you can pull the mold up. Making a 2 part mold? Don't expect to be able to use it with 48 hours of starting to make the mold.

These molds are of the various parts for the thunderbolt. The molds at the top are the engine mounts and the intakes for the engine. To save time I made 2 molds of each so I could cast up the pair of each part I needed in one go. 

The wing mold... oi vey as this thing ever been a pain in the butt. See here's the thing. In the final wing I want to have magnets in the bottom of the wing Pylon so I can attach hell fire missiles or fuel pods to the model. So I want to be able to put the magnets IN the wing pylons when I cast the wing. Well there's no way I can cast the pylons, and the wing at the same time. So I have to spray down the mold with release agent first, then cast the pylons and let those set till at least stiff and not runny. Then I have to close us the mold, and cast the rest of the wing. And what happens if any part of the process has a problem or isn't done correctly?

This!

So what do I do? I have to be VERY patient and do each step correctly each time. Roughly it will take me about an hour and half to cast the wing properly.

Like this one:

The rest of the casting results depend largely on my patience when I cast the part in the question. The exception to this are the engine intakes and the engine mounts.

 The intakes turn out fairly well with little effort. Just a little clean up to even out the backs and they'll be good to use.

The engine mounts likewise turn out well easily enough. To reduce the weight, and the amount of resin I need for each I submerged sealed styrene tubes in to the resin as it's setting. You can see one of the tubes in the above picture. This effectively makes the part hollow with needing to make it a multi-part construct. Again, just need a little clean up to make the piece workable.

The Engine itself as been a trying expirament:

Oh yeah, the engine has proven to be the most difficult large piece to cast. Because of the small details on it, the resin tends to "bubble" over the details and then dry, leaving a void in the finished piece. You can this in the first couple attempts. So how have I solved this? Simple. Patiance. Namely instead of trying to cast the entire engine in one single go I try to cast in three steps using less resin and poring the resin very slowly at each step.

In this lastest effort I did it in three passes, pouring about 1/2 ounce of resin each time, pouring it along the shaft of a stir stick and trying to keep it the pour rate to a very shallow thin stream in order to give the resin time to spread out and fill in the details on the inside of the mold. Still need some clean up on the finished piece but a substantial improvement over the earlier attempts.

The small tiny details on the weapons have been an absolute nightmare to overcome and honestly I haven't quit gotten them beat yet. Much like the small detail on the engine, the resin as a tendency to bubble up and fill the mold of the smaller pieces creating these large gaping voids ruining the part.

This is the most notable example of this particular problem. Where is the rest of the Lascannon? And why is the body of the hellstrike Missile hollow? Yep, that bubbling problem at work again.

This casting was notably better but still has a hallow body to the lascannon. I MIGHT be able to use this one. Have to look into it more closely.

This is actually the best casting of those parts yet. YES it has a metric crap ton of clean up on it but guess what? All the of parts and pieces are there! So that's a win.

Now, here's a piece of advice for you if you get into casting: Spend the $10 bucks and get one of these:

Why? So that if you have an extra 1/2 ounce of resin you don't waste it. Spray this rock mold with some mold release and pour the extra resin into the mold. Just save the extra rocks in a box. You can use the rocks for basing or other terrain projects. You'll look into the box at some point and go "Holy crap! That would look great for my [insert model name here] as a base!" or something of that nature. And you'll wind up with plenty of them in a hurry too.

Same thing works if you're using green stuff and have some extra. Press the extra into the rock mold. Viola! You've got a rock you can use for basing or detailing.

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New update on Project Thunderhawk... er bolt... thunderhawk bolt

Okay so I'm not sure what I'm calling this project anymore. I'm still intending to build a Thunderhawk, but the case-study of building a Thunderbolt has really taken on it's own life and become a project onto itself. Regardless I am making progress. One of the key points I was planning on under taking in building the Thunderbolt was scratching one engine and then casting two copies of it for the finished model. Well, I've finished building the original master:

The engine itself is build with a long central tube, and several larger segments of tubing glued to the body. I'll explain in more detail below.

The red is a single long tube measuring 5 centimeters. if you look at the front you'll see 2 colored rings, one purple and one blue. Those are each another ring of piping affixed to the tube. The green ring further back is another segment of tube the same thickness as the purple tube at the front, but this one has a layer of roof textured glued to it. Then the green and black segments in the front are lengths of hex rod glued in place.

The way the template has the engines, they are built in 2 parts and then each affixed to a box on the side of the main body. Here you see the scratch built air-intake and the main engine housing.

I have some details to add to the master before it's ready to cast but it's all repetitive details, items that appear in multiple places on the finished model. So what I'm going to do is quick-cast a mold of the master of the detail part, then with the finished mold use green stuff to cast copies of it that can then be affixed to the engine master. With a little luck, I'll be posting on that in the next few days.

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Project: Thunderhawk part 3

So I've run into the first real problem with translating a paper template to a thicker medium:

Yep, the spacing. See this template was designed for paper witch is very very thin. I'm not sure of the actual measurement, but for the point of discussion we'll say it's 1 sheet thick. The card stock I've using is mostly cereal boxes and the like which appears to be about 15-20 sheet thick. The way this template works is by layering shapes ontop of on another to create raised and recessed details. With some details being 3 or even 4 layers on top of one another that's a 4 sheet height. Cool.

Now take the exact same plans and apply them to card stock which is about 20 times as thick as a sheet of paper. You've got part 3, on top of part 2 on top of part 1. And each is 20 sheets thick. A better explination might be a visual explination:

 

The image on the left is a series of 1pixel wide shapes stacked on top of  each other, while the one on the right is a similar lay out but with 20pixel wide blocks. You can see how the difference in thicknesses adds up, and quickly. Now take this, and compound it by 3 and 4 sub structures and you can wind up with parts that are out of alignment by as much as a 1/4 inch and you have followed the directions perfectly.

This is really the crux of why I'm doing this prototype model in cardstock rather then jumping into plasticard. This project is going to take a lot of plasticard and I want the plasticard version to look built, not slapped together. And I don't want to waste a metric crap ton worth of plasticard either. 

So what am I going to do to correct this? Well, one of the nice things about sheet stryene is it's a machined material so it's a consistent thickness. With that in mind I can then go back to the plans and begine breaking down the parts and figure out what pieces of what part will be done with 2mm styrene, what parts will be in 1mm, what will be in .5mm and what will need to be be .01mm sheeting. 

So what I'm doing is as I build the model in cardstock, I make notes about how each part lays in the plans and on the finished part. Then dropping the plans into photoshop and color coding those parts to differentiat styrene thickness. 

 

The light blue is indictive of the part being made of 2mm sheet styrene. The light green .01mm sheet and the orange in 1mm sheet. If my measurements are right the parts should lay op on top of one another, and then with a little filler putty, should produce something comparable to the tank kits from Games workshop. I hope anyway. We'll see.

As an aside I've been thinking about lighting. I mean wiring up the model with LEDs and lights.

Operating purely on the "This would be awesome" level of planning right now, I'm looking into having 3 circuits in the finished model. The first circuit would be internal lighting for the cockpit and lower deck with an on/off switch, the 2nd circuit will be a pulsing circuit and will be the engines, while the third circuit will be on an active switch. The idea being I can turn the lights on in the cockpit and lower deck, I can press and hold a switch and the inside of the thunderhawk cannon barrel will glow red, while if I flip the third switch the interior of the engines will pulse blue/white.

Now I admit that lighting plan is well above my electrical skills. Hell skills make it sound like I actually know what I'm doing with electronics. All I can do is wire a switch and light to a battery pack. But I also like challenges and I am pursuing several avenues to help me with this.

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Development of the Thunderhawk

So, I am beginning work on the Thunderhawk. At this stage what I am doing is taking the paperhammer template provided by Patoroch and building the model in sections on card stock. As I complete each section I will then reverse engineer it to understand how the parts go together, how they accomplish that, and why they are designed that way. Then I have to figure out if I can accomplish the same thing in Plasticard and Styrene and if so; how?

So here is my first effort: The Engine.

This piece has been constructed out of cardboard stock and assembled based on the instructions in the plans. I made a couple mistakes along the way but this is the part of the project to make those. So with the part built I then began studying it to determine what I want to do with the design in styrene.

So I went into photoshop, pulled the page with the plans over into it and began to break it down and make notes about it. Here is the result:

I've broken the plans, for the engine, down into small color coded sections. Each color corrosponds to a type and thickness of styrene. The light blue represents a 28mm tube while the yellow-green represents strips of styrene sheeting that will be 2mm wide.

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A little scratch building

So, we've all seen 'em:

 

Thunderhawks! Yup those big aw-inspiring Space Marine Flyers! Well, I'm going to build one! But not right away. I'm still somewhat new to scratch building and have only worked with Plasticard a couple of times so I simply do not feel that my skills are up to the challenge of such an undertaking yet. 

So I'm embarking on some smaller scale scratch building projects:

This is an in-progress shot of a scratch build Razorback and a land speeder.

The Land speeder is about as done as it can be. The plans I'm working from don't translate well from cardboard to plastic and I need to go back to the plans to figure out what I need to change. So far the Razorback seems to be coming along well. I will post more updates on them through out the project.

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