Onward and upward! A happy new year!

I have put the build of the Saturn V into a lower gear and as soon as I did, I stumbled upon this little model of the Skylon space plane that recently was released by Techikun. 
(-In .pdo format, which I detest because Mac users cannot easily acces these files. Luckily there was Doug on Papermodelers.com who came to the rescue and was so kind to convert it into a .PDF file for me. Why oh why is it so hard for everyone to just release their Pepakura model files in an overall accessible format?)

I immediately too off with this model because I really love the sleek shape and design of this futuristic hybrid rocket plane.
How the build went, is revealed after the jump.

I started out of course with the fuselage. I used black paper because Skylon is completely black. I printed the file (one single page) onto plain 80 gram copy paper and just cut through this into the black paper underneath.

Although the fuselage appeared a little too rough for my taste immediately after gluing, it dried up very nicely and with nice tight seams. the wings were a little bit of a riddle without having a decent instruction accompanying the model but with some threeview drawings of the Skylon it all fell into place in the end.

Then came the engine nacelles. The Sabre is a very special hybrid engine. It is partial jet engine which can get the plane up to speeds close to mach 5 after which the shockwave cone at the front closes the intake and switches to the oxygen tank inside the plane. It then becomes a rocket engine that takes the Skylon out of the atmosphere to release its payload in orbit.

In the model, the back end of the Sabre engine is just a circle shaped surface, without any detail. Now that had to change.
I took a long hard look at the drawings of the Sabre engine and tried to render it in the 1/400 paper versions.

The result was reasonable, I guess.

Now for the final pictures. I took some fiberfill stuff and tore it loose to more or less resemble clouds, where the Skylon just has pierced through. For a 4 hour build not a bad end result, I think.

That's it for now, see you soon!
--PK