Sunday, 31 August 2014

Everyone will be 'Vetted...

This is the thing that has been holding me up lately and why I had to have the pleasing relief of the boats in the post below or go mad.
It's a 1956 Corvette SS Sebring. Apparently it did one race and only the one was made.
It's a very strange thing with scalloped sides, an asymmetric bulge and that rocket ship headrest.  Then there's those teeth! Ye Gods, those teeth...15 individually keyed pieces of styrene, notched onto a horizontal bar, all backed by a plate that keeps it all together for the poor resin caster who takes this on.
It's the usual 1/32nd scale for a slot racing body.
This was largely made last year, but the vents and all those endless lines of slots on the bonnet, entire back panel and cills had to be done by photo-etching.  In recent days of yore I would have drawn them with a pen, laid out in the final style of the fret, drawn maybe 4 times bigger. Then the etchers would have photographed it down to wonderfully crisp images.
But no!...now you have to send a computer file.  Well, I don't do push button modelmaking, so it was down to the client to get it done from a few dimensioned sketches from me.  That process began last September!  I got the p/e finally drawn correctly on some American student's PC last month!
So much for the potential of computers.
Having got the p/e I had to create 10 thou recesses for the separate parts and blend them in to the final surface.

The client is delighted, but that hasn't stopped him getting 3D printed blobs done and some schmuck to clean that dross up,  putting the real detail in by hand.
Needless to say, I will NOT be doing any of that nonsense.

With the Skoda rally car finished and the boats done, too,  I am now up to date with that stuff, but woefully behind with the model aircraft masters.  So tomorrow, the decks will be cleared and out comes the 1/76th scale master of the Pilatus PC12 Bizjet, 1/32nd scale Dragon Rapide and 1/32nd scale Junkers Ju 388 Transkit.  The former, fine...the latter, I am NOT looking forward to.  I try at all times to avoid toy War, but a man's gotta eat, dammit.
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2 comments:

  1. Iain Robinson3 September 2014 at 01:39

    That's incredible work, Martin! I admire the implicit confidence in your description, whenever I have to produce masters I am very anxious until I see the outcome, a bag of nerves actually as coefficients of volumetric expansion and such have never been my forte. Thos teeth are amazing - real old-school, proper model making. Again, despite working with a computer and photo-etching with Adobe Illustrator since the nineties, it is very easy to get the dimensions mucked up, something it is not so easy to do if you are drawing things out by hand. I hope you will let us see the aircraft masters when you finish them!

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  2. Odds3 September 2014 at 02:41

    Thanks, Iain.
    I have done so many of these things over the years, that I am running almost on auto pilot! Next is an Audi Group S rally car that ran for a few kilometres and was then shelved! That client is what can only be called an enthusiast!
    I will be putting the PC12 progress on here shortly. As to shrinkage...no caster /moulder has ever given me a shrinkage rate, so as it's very low on resins, I don't bother with it. But vac-formed window patterns have to be done to a final production body to make sure they fit well.

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