Atlas MA-6 Freedom 7 in 1/96

Another inbetweenie. This time an addition to my ever growing rocket garden. This is the Atlas-D which lifted John Glenn into orbit in 1962. I used silver card for the hull and tie fairings and cable runs. The engines were made from thick grey card and I used some bare metal foil for the silver accents. the kits used were Mark Cable's remake of the precision paper models Atlas model and Carl Hewlett's Mercury capsule, reduced in size to 1/96.

The lettering on the hull was done with decals I printed myself.

A shiny candle.

more after the break.

I used a printing medium on the silver card because the inkjet ink originally wouldn't hold onto the paper, it just formed little balls of ink and wouldn't dry up in a nice line. This medium is called "Digital Ground for non-porous surfaces" by a brand called Golden. My paper modeling friend Billy Leliveld told about it on the forum some time ago.
 It appeared very useful into having the print in fine lines onto the silver paper. Only disadvantage was that it still was very sensitive to water. I made some nasty fingerprints during gluing and tried to wipe them off. I wiped the ground layer off. Then I discovered that the stuff we Dutchies call Glassex and is internationally more known as Windex, completely erases all of the layer very easily, leaving a great shiny surface without any lines or spots. I decided to go on building and make the hull and clean it with glassex/windex afterwards. In the end it left me with a shiny Atlas hull in 1/96. I knew I had to make the necessary lettering and numbering on the hull myself. I recently learnt myself how to make my own decals so here was the second rocket I could practice on.

The two outer engines were used for the lift off and were jettisoned after a couple of minutes. the Atlas would continue on its cente "sustainer" engine. This was called a one-and-a-half-stage rocket.

This is the exhaust pipe of the turbo pump. When the rocket rose from the pad it caused a spectacular orange flame besides the bright yellow-white flames from the rocket engines. the turbo pump was used to feed fuel to the combustion chambers of the engines, and the pump used a little of the rocket's fuel to run. This was flared by this pipe. 

The engine housing was made from aluminium coloured paper and I cut out strips to simulate the corrugated effect on the hull. The vernier engines were rolled pieces of paper.
The engines again were great renditions of the real stuff. The sustainer engine in the middle a big bulky bucket shape, the booster engine bells a more subtle bell shape. I scratched the plumbing on the sustainer. the turbo pump exhaust got some struts made from pins. 

Pins really are great material for small latticework!

The capsule was a piece of cake. I made the escape tower from brass rod (the vertical rods) and pins (the latticework). All glued with CA and painted with Tamiya matte red.

It is amazing how small those first manned rockets were. If you compare it to its offspring, the copper-coloured Atlas V right behind it, it already shows the increase in size (and power) but compared to the giant Saturn V in the left corner it really is a dwarf. And between the Atlas and the Saturn only were six years.

Okay, off we go! Next one please! (-;