I hope you will forgive me if I throw in the towel a few months from now, but in the mean time I'm good to go.
I managed to find a set of Papercraft plans for this model, without them I would not have even bothered to start this. The plans are of the Endurance, but the Lander and Ranger are included. I built the paper lander to get a better sense of what I was facing and as a visual reference. I did find a few things that were not quite right so I'll fix those as I go.
One detail of the craft are these honeycomb textured panels.
A friend suggested something bee keepers use called Honeycomb Foundation. Its a panel of honeycomb that allows bees to build their structures on. I bought a panel and thought I had my solution. I thought I could drill a small hole in each cell and vacuum form styrene over it and it would be perfect. But each cell is 5 mm wide, and once I started counting cells in screen captures and doing math and ratios etc. I realized my finished model would be about 80cm long or about 31 inches. Much to big for my shelf, but perfect for a studio scale model for anyone that wants to do that.
So I set my sights on another path, 3D printing my own panels. I picked a size that I wanted my model to be, 35 cm or about 14 inches. This meant that each cell needed to be about 2.5mm. I spent several evenings on Tinkercad building cells into panels.
I needed the panels to interlock perfectly with each other and that's the part that took some time to get right.
I have access to a Makerbot 2, but when I tried to print my panels the program choked on the slicing stage. I solved that by making the panels smaller, about 20mmx28mm. But the prints were not detailed enough for my liking. I opted to send my file off to Shapeways and had them printed and the results are great. I made a quick rubber mold to see what a cast panel would look like. The original print is the frosted one on the right, the cast (in tinted smooth-cast 300) on the left.
I then made a new two part mold and several casts, then I made a mold of 6 of those and was able to cast several panels at a time.
I knew I would need larger panels, and fitting smaller pieces together was getting tedious. So I glued four panels together and made a mold of them.
And the first panel is done.
I did manage to successfully print window frames that I will use in my model.
I'm currently waiting for the delivery of this part, the docking ring. Again it took me several tries to get this right.
I'll make a mold and cast a pair of these, then add some extra details.
Well that's my update for now, wish me luck. I'll post again when I have much more to show.
