Mir 1/400 [7]

I could find some time to work on a few solar panels. I first did the dorsal panel, which differs from the two side "wings" because it was folded like an harmonica and extended by a truss between both of the sides, instead of panel by panel on a kind of pantograph arm. Whatever. Tech talk. I used a small round aluminium tube which I carefully sanded to a more squared shape. The zig-zag folded parts of the solar array were glued on with CA. A little layer of gloss for extra depth was added to the photo paper. The second array was one of the side "wings" of the base block. I used 100 gram paper for the yellow backside to make it lighter and thinner. Anyway, the pictures speak for itself. 

The right hand "wing" panel was divided into the five parts it originally folds up to.

More stuff after the jump.

 Glossy photo paper. Shiny indeed but also a bit fragile on the edges.

Back part is plain coloured 200 grams paper. Maybe a little thick, but this way it was more easy to glue to the aluminium tube.

 

Voilà!

Underneath the unfolded array there were two small blocks of mat card added, to represent the containers the array unfolded from. In reality the central structure (the tube) is a very thin but strong latticework that expanded from a small cylinder. It pulled the array like a banner out of the containers on both sides.

The array still is able to turn on its axis. In the meantime I started work on Spektr. That will be a lot of scratch building. More on that later.
Bye for now!