My very own Saturn V again, after 35 years
When I was very young (5 or 6) my parents bought already space-mad me an Airfix 1:144 Saturn V model (and very kindly put it together for me). It was my pride and joy until it say on the back shelf of our car during a house move on a very hot day in 1975 and melted. My parents then even more kindly obtained and put together a replacement.
I soon got into model-making in my own right and recall making various other Airfix space kits (the 1:144 Space Shuttle and the 1:72 Lunar Module come to mind) but rather fell away from it when I got to play with computers.
Then, in 2010, as the result of a joke with attimes_bracing I ended up building a rather silly customised 1:72 Avro Vulcan. I found it surprisingly good fun, and went on to put together a 1:48 F-117 stealth fighter. Then, at Christmas, my brother gave me... the Airfix Saturn V kit! Time to carry on with my revived hobby, and indeed revisit my youth.
Putting it together took about three weeks on and off. I would do a little bit as a break from legal preparation, and I have to say I've found it very therapeutic to be doing something practical with my hands. Actually constructing the model was fairly straightforward, although if I did it again I would pay even more attention to filling joins and gaps with modelling putty and smoothing the result down to a proper smooth finish. What was time-consuming was the paint job.
The basic colour scheme of the Saturn V is white. But it's a big model, with a lot of large, smooth areas. The solution to this is to spray, so I used a large removals box as an improvised spray-hood and sprayed the stages with primer and then white paint.
If the Saturn V had been plain white it would then have just been a case of moving on to fine detail. However, it had a characteristic and very distinctive black-and-white paint pattern. This served the purpose of helping with optical tracking during launch and in particular of allowing the rocket's attitude to be determined from film and photographs - important in the event of something going wrong, especially if for some reason telemetry was lost. Tracking roll (rotation of the rocket around its long axis) was particularly important, hence the vertical black stripes. Furthermore, the pattern on the conical interstage between the S-II second stage and the S-IVB third stage is in fact a two-bit binary code; the quadrants are white, black/white, white/black and black, thus allowing the rocket's roll position to be determined even from a very distant picture.
Painting these by hand would have been a nightmare, so I marked them out with masking tape before painting the black areas with a brush and black Humbrol enamel. My first attempt led to black paint seeping under the tape, so after a clean-off and white respray I tried again, this time being very careful to rub down the edges of the masking tape. A further hint I picked up from some online research was to then spray over the masking tape with the underlying colour (i.e. white) to help seal the join. All that was very time-consuming and fiddly:
Second time worked fine, although I had to go back with a very small brush and touch up some detailed areas. I then sprayed all over with satin-finish varnish coat before applying the decals. As well as the prominent US national markings, these also included various camera targets and identifiers - the supplied decals even include the tiny (at 1:144 scale!) "S-IC-6" markings identifying this as the sixth flight-ready Saturn V as used to launch Apollo 11. A final coat of varnish to seal the decals and my Saturn V was done:
This is the re-issue of this kit from a few years ago, in which Airfix took the opportunity to fix some of the deficiencies of the original issue as dating from the era of Apollo 11. As well as correcting the paint instructions, which had until then been based on the slightly different paint pattern used on the first ground test model of the Saturn V, the model had a new Apollo spacecraft and adaptor to replace the grossly out-of-scale one in the original kit issue.
However, there was one area where the revised kit is still not quite right. It's a forgivable error, as all three surviving Saturn Vs on display are also wrong, or at least incomplete. The first stage has five of the huge F-1 engines, still the largest and most powerful single-chamber rocket engine ever built. For flight, these were protected by 'batting', foil-wrapped asbestos blankets, but these were applied after the stage had been stacked vertically in the Vehicle Assembly Building on top of the mobile launch platform. As such, hardly any photos of the Saturn V visibly show the engines with insulation fitted, as by the time it was done it was hard to see. The display Saturn Vs were assembled from left-over stages at the end of the Apollo programme, and either the engine insulation kits had been scrapped or nobody bothered with the significant effort of fitting them. As such, their engines are bare, as are all the individual F-1 engines on display, and look like this:
Someone on a space history forum eventually tracked down a rare picture of an F-1 with insulation fitted, and it looks like this:
You can buy after-market modification parts to represent the engines with insulation. But it occurred to me that there might be cheaper and simpler ways to get the same effect - such as to wrap the engines in masking tape and then paint that silver.
The result, as seen on the picture above, seems to work ok and will do for me.
Overall, I'm quite pleased with the model although I now want to make another to build on the lessons learned doing this one...
This entry was originally posted at http://major-clanger.dreamwidth.org/21282.html, where there are
comments.
I soon got into model-making in my own right and recall making various other Airfix space kits (the 1:144 Space Shuttle and the 1:72 Lunar Module come to mind) but rather fell away from it when I got to play with computers.
Then, in 2010, as the result of a joke with attimes_bracing I ended up building a rather silly customised 1:72 Avro Vulcan. I found it surprisingly good fun, and went on to put together a 1:48 F-117 stealth fighter. Then, at Christmas, my brother gave me... the Airfix Saturn V kit! Time to carry on with my revived hobby, and indeed revisit my youth.
Putting it together took about three weeks on and off. I would do a little bit as a break from legal preparation, and I have to say I've found it very therapeutic to be doing something practical with my hands. Actually constructing the model was fairly straightforward, although if I did it again I would pay even more attention to filling joins and gaps with modelling putty and smoothing the result down to a proper smooth finish. What was time-consuming was the paint job.
The basic colour scheme of the Saturn V is white. But it's a big model, with a lot of large, smooth areas. The solution to this is to spray, so I used a large removals box as an improvised spray-hood and sprayed the stages with primer and then white paint.
If the Saturn V had been plain white it would then have just been a case of moving on to fine detail. However, it had a characteristic and very distinctive black-and-white paint pattern. This served the purpose of helping with optical tracking during launch and in particular of allowing the rocket's attitude to be determined from film and photographs - important in the event of something going wrong, especially if for some reason telemetry was lost. Tracking roll (rotation of the rocket around its long axis) was particularly important, hence the vertical black stripes. Furthermore, the pattern on the conical interstage between the S-II second stage and the S-IVB third stage is in fact a two-bit binary code; the quadrants are white, black/white, white/black and black, thus allowing the rocket's roll position to be determined even from a very distant picture.
Painting these by hand would have been a nightmare, so I marked them out with masking tape before painting the black areas with a brush and black Humbrol enamel. My first attempt led to black paint seeping under the tape, so after a clean-off and white respray I tried again, this time being very careful to rub down the edges of the masking tape. A further hint I picked up from some online research was to then spray over the masking tape with the underlying colour (i.e. white) to help seal the join. All that was very time-consuming and fiddly:
Second time worked fine, although I had to go back with a very small brush and touch up some detailed areas. I then sprayed all over with satin-finish varnish coat before applying the decals. As well as the prominent US national markings, these also included various camera targets and identifiers - the supplied decals even include the tiny (at 1:144 scale!) "S-IC-6" markings identifying this as the sixth flight-ready Saturn V as used to launch Apollo 11. A final coat of varnish to seal the decals and my Saturn V was done:
This is the re-issue of this kit from a few years ago, in which Airfix took the opportunity to fix some of the deficiencies of the original issue as dating from the era of Apollo 11. As well as correcting the paint instructions, which had until then been based on the slightly different paint pattern used on the first ground test model of the Saturn V, the model had a new Apollo spacecraft and adaptor to replace the grossly out-of-scale one in the original kit issue.
However, there was one area where the revised kit is still not quite right. It's a forgivable error, as all three surviving Saturn Vs on display are also wrong, or at least incomplete. The first stage has five of the huge F-1 engines, still the largest and most powerful single-chamber rocket engine ever built. For flight, these were protected by 'batting', foil-wrapped asbestos blankets, but these were applied after the stage had been stacked vertically in the Vehicle Assembly Building on top of the mobile launch platform. As such, hardly any photos of the Saturn V visibly show the engines with insulation fitted, as by the time it was done it was hard to see. The display Saturn Vs were assembled from left-over stages at the end of the Apollo programme, and either the engine insulation kits had been scrapped or nobody bothered with the significant effort of fitting them. As such, their engines are bare, as are all the individual F-1 engines on display, and look like this:
Someone on a space history forum eventually tracked down a rare picture of an F-1 with insulation fitted, and it looks like this:
You can buy after-market modification parts to represent the engines with insulation. But it occurred to me that there might be cheaper and simpler ways to get the same effect - such as to wrap the engines in masking tape and then paint that silver.
The result, as seen on the picture above, seems to work ok and will do for me.
Overall, I'm quite pleased with the model although I now want to make another to build on the lessons learned doing this one...
This entry was originally posted at http://major-clanger.dreamwidth.org/21282.html, where there are
comments.