N1 1/96 [3] - Blok B

The second stage is under way. There's a lot more going on here so it takes a little more time to show you any progress in the build. I'd rather take it slow than to rush it and mess it up.
So, stage two. Fewer engines, just eight, but lots of doodads, thingamajigs and whatchamecallits on the fuselage. Fuel pipe fairings, cable runs, reaction control thrusters, that sort of things. And that is tedious work. Sometimes the 200+gram/m2 paper does the job perfectly but it also is sometimes just a bad choice because of its thickness.
First up were some cable runs, second came the fuel pipe fairings. Just like Blok A, they are slot-based objects and I dread slots. It has tendencies to show big seams and often fits bad. I tried to make the tightly bent and curved fairings from the thick 200+gpm2 paper but they turned out very wobbly and misshapen.

So it was time to try a new method, using thin paper and an inner structure. Beer mat paper and a rolled cylinder inside did the trick. those wobbly fuel fairings needed to go. I ripped them off of the hull.

Now here's a newer one, to the right of all the old wobbly fairings. It is a little darker but it will discolour slightly in the long turn. I will treat it with UV spray when the stage is ready and hopefully that will keep it in the right range of colour for a longer time.

The ingredients of making the new fairings. I reprinted the fairings on a piece of brownish grey paper, about 100gpm2. Long strips of beer mat paper were cut from.. well, a beer mat and I used a knitting pen for rolling the cylinders I hid inside for shaping the fairings right.

And thus they got onto the hull and looked quite good. Lots of things to do still, that will come later next week. As said, I take this one slow, there is stuff to do besides paper modeling...

Thanks for stopping by and taking a look at my attempts to build a decent model. See you all soon!
--PK