Watchers of the Skies: Planck [2]

The times are filled with loads of stuff to do. At the moment we just have started the actual editing of not one but three documentary films that all have to be finished in the summer. (a link to the trailer of the biggest one will follow soon.) So you can imagine I do not have seas of time to work on my model stuff, even though I'd love to. 

Anyway, I did make some progress the last week. Planck is a nice little model, and I am using two different designs and kind of kitbash them together. One is John Jogerst's kit, a very fine and easy fitting model. The other is one I downloaded from the ESA website. It' much simpler but on some parts the graphics are better. So I use the best of both and of course a lot of scratch building.
After a couple of days, I found the thermal shields of the probe were too thick, they were made up of three thick layers of paper and it just got too bulky for my taste. So I redid then using just one layer of paper in which I carefully removed some gloss top surface to mimic the petals' separation lines. The bottom side was covered with petals of aluminium tape. These looked so much better.
Here's one photo, the rest of the pictures are as usual after the jump.

 

Planck's sun shields are three dish-like structures on top of each other,  the upper ones gradually smaller in diameter. They are held in place and separated by a thin latticework of rods. which I did in brass rods, of which the bottom part was wrapped in a thin layer of aluminium sticky tape, so they would all be the same length.
 

Then the top parts got the same treatment for keeping the second dish evenly placed on top of the bottom one.
 

I pre-drilled small holes in the dishes which were gradually closer toward each other, so the rods would be automagically arranged diagonally and that their feet touched one and other.
 

The top dish has a black top surface, the bottom is silvery. The rods all met each other well and I used a tiny drop of CA to secure them in place.
 

Bottom ring.
 

Next up is the baffle structure. In here the two dishes of the telescope are placed and the receiving part of the optical unit. The rods are at the bottom of the baffle. 

So that is where I have to leave you for the time being, I hope I can get some new stuff done this wekend. And hopefully I can put it online, too.
In the meantime, thanks for your time and see you soon.
--PK