Time for a new project! A while ago I came across The Art of Mass Effect, at the time I didn't know it was a video game, I just liked the look of the art. One of the images really caught my eye.
It's the M35 MAKO and I always thought it would be a neat model to build. But this was the only image I had, so not really much to go on for building. As I searched for more images I found a set of paper craft plans and set them aside. Around December I started to tackle this project. I decided on how big I would build this model, based on nothing more than how big I wanted it to be, about 14 inches long. No real reason, that just seemed to be a good size to work on.
One of the aspects of the build that I thought would be tricky were the tires, early on I thought I could find a toy truck that I could use or carefully carve a tire and cast them. Fortunately I recently acquired access to a 3D printer so I set about to go that route.
I used a free online program called Tinkercad to design a tire that could be printed. This is what I came up with.
Using a Makerbot Replicator 2, I printed one tire.
The tire measures 66mm in diameter and took about 3 hours to print. Now I know that the look of printed items is not as good as I would like it to be as you can see each line as the print works it's way up.
And the material does not sand well, so I knew I would be molding and casting these.
A two part silicone mold made of Smooth-On's Mold Max 40. No fill hole or venting as I will be doing a slurry cast. I don't want to fill the entire mold with casting material, otherwise I'll have a solid heavy tire. A slurry cast uses less material and spreads an even coat on the inside of the mold, making a hollow tire.
To make a slurry cast I had to build my own Roto-caster. Click here to see it in action.
So after a few nights of casting, and sanding I came out with a half dozen tires. They're made of Smooth-On's Onyx Fast, which was a mistake. It sets up fast, too fast. I ended up with OK tires, but they are weighted on one side where the bulk of the material suddenly set. I should have used the slower setting Onyx, it would have produced a more even coat in the mold.
While I was making tires, I was trying to make sense of the Paper-Craft plans in order to build the body. I wanted to vacuum form the upper and lower parts of the body so they could be mated into a whole body. Trying to measure and scale all the different angles and shapes on the underside was becoming quite daunting. I ended up tweaking the shapes slightly to make my job easier and to make forming them possible. The 'buck' was made of various pieces of MDF and assembled together. The curves were a bit tricky but they came out quite nicely.
Mocked up with the tires, it's looking like the real thing.
So on the weekend I attempted to vacuum form the upper and lower hull, but was finding my home made vacuum former is not up to the task. I'm using a shop vac and it's just not powerful enough to do the job. So later I'm going to borrow a better shop vac and see how that goes. If that doesn't work I have a plan, but we'll see how things go on Friday.
In the mean time I started building and molding the suspension system. That will be next.
