Éole from a dream

This time I took a road a little different. I was in a poetic mood, I guess.

Now, some years ago I built Clément Ader's Éole, a steam-powered aircraft from 1890 which allegedly flew a few dozens of meters , just 50 centimeters from the ground. Whether if it's true or not, the aircraft itself is a beautiful thing to behold with its bat-like wings and its pretty shaped fuselage.

Now, my real profession, as some of you might know, is film maker. A friend of mine from that 'scene' won 'best film' in last year's local film competition with her beautifully made, dreamy animation film 'Memories wrapped in paper planes". The film has a very poetic quality and rewatching it a couple of weeks ago, it suddenly inspired me to build the Éole again, but in a more surreal and possible etheric way.

For All Mankind - an (ongoing) review of a what-if series.

When I read Apple had made an original alternative history series about NASA and the space race with the Soviets, I was over the moon (pun intended). I really was looking forward to the first episode. And it was good. Okay, I realised they took a lot of liberties and immediately there were discussions online on whether it was realistic enough with all the initial deviations from our timeline. I didn't bother to elaborate on them, it is after all a work of fiction, just starting out at a point in real time.
I was prepared to put all of those incorrect things aside to just enjoy a different point of view, with some ficticious names and storylines. The first five episodes were very good. They focused on the somewhat clumsy efforts NASA took to get something done, some personal drama here and there, but they followed that history line. That was the base of the series. Good. It had good characters, the set dressing was meticulous and superb in its attention for contemporary details.

The last 4 episodes changed my opinion. After making a couple of well-placed jumps in time, they got stuck in 1974, with an absurd amount of huge disastrous events piling up on one another. So many, that it has not even degraded to a regular SF drama but to just plain unrealistic, in spite of all the detail and realism in all the props and sets.

Blast from the past (no pun intended): the N-1 1/96 - 3 years later

Finally, I have finished the N-1. Three years after more or less abandoning the project I picked it up a couple of weeks back and sdtarted working on a bnew fairing. I first wanted to see the rocket finished as such, with just the fairing on. On the way there, I decided, I would sit and ponder over what to do with the still very beautifully made (yeah, I am still really proud of it) LOK moon train. Anyway, for now, here's the finished N1!

Some stats: 108 cm length and about 23 cm at its widest. The fairing is empty of course, filled with rings and glue and all that. The LOK stack is laying on a shelf, awaiting the solution to how to do the transparent fairing I STILL want to make. I think I have an idea, I'll keep you posted. I want to get this one next to the Saturn V in the National Space Museum in Lelystad, because I think what they have in their rocket showcase now is horribly undetailed and totally out of scale with the Saturn. This might provide some necessary nuance.

Hoofdstation Groningen 1/487 (or almost)

Hello people. Here I am again.

There was a lot of other stuff going on which kept me from posting and building regularly. But I did keep on building.

First, the Shuttle stack is momentarily on the back burner, I found out that the SRB's were too large, and I needed to address that issue first before continuing. I have to resize all components and I also want to detail a little more. But I will resume. I don't like unfinished projects. This is what I was working on the last few weeks.

A couple of weeks back, the train station (called “Hoofdstation”) in my city was elected most beautiful station in the Netherlands. And of course that is true. 

(If only that cursed atrocity of a “stadsbalkon”, which lies in front of the building, could be demolished and be replaced with something that shows a little more respect to the old neo-gothic building.)

To celebrate the election of the Hoofdstation, the Groninger Archives temporarily re-issued the big paper model of the station building of which they had a copy in their collection. They digitally scanned it and put it online in the original scale. It is a nice, hand-drawn, but rather tough model of the building. The build report follows below.

Still here, but..

Hi friends, visitors.
I still am here, I still am doing model stuff and all that.
It's just that lately I cannot find the proper inspiration to really get some progress on stuff. There's a lot to be finished, there's some stuff I want to make and there's stuff I have to do in real life outside the hobby room. 

At the moment, the stuff outside the paper works is demanding too much of my attention. I will be back but for now, have a little patience.
--PK

Inbetweenies: Hütter Hü-136 Stubo Race plane

It is time for an inbetweenie. The External tank is finished, pictures will follow soon, and before I will try my luck on the Solid Rocket Boosters I wanted to do a quick inbetweenie. So there it is.
The Hütter Hü-136 was a proposed German WW2 experimental dive bomber designed right before the war. It lost the competition to other planes so it was never built. But suppose it was. It would have been a nice weirdo for air races after the war. Make up your own what-if story here. Here's a photo of the result, if you read the rest of the story you'll see the rest.

A short visit to some old friends

I visited the Aviodrome today, together with the producer for the documentary film my partner and me are working on (for almost 5 years now) to talk about cooperation in the production. It looks promising.

I took the opportunity to pay a visit to my models which have on display there. I haven’t had the chance before to see them on show.

Here are some pictures I shot of the showcases with my models (amongst others).

So there are models I didn't make in this picture but mine definitely are the best ones. (-;

More after the jump.

Space Shuttle Endeavour with ET and SRB's in 1/96 [Part 7]

Hi friends. Here I am again.
In the time inbetween posts I've been quite busy. I hardly find myself at my desk with paper, glue and some music these days. I wish it was a little different, but I really have to keep a couple of china plates spinning on long flexible sticks, it seems. And to be honest, I do like what I am doing at the moment.
Anyway, enough about that. How about that Space Shuttle Stack I was working on? Well, here's where I am now. ET nearing completion.  How I got there is in the story below.

Time for an inbetweenie! - Zio's Fiat CR.42 "Falco"

The External tank of my shuttle build is going steadily and well, but I was desperately in need of some direct result. And there's one designer who made just the right models for such a job: Fabrizio Prudenziati. His models are always such a joy to build. This time I chose his model of the late 1930's biplane Fiat CR.42 Falco. A little harder than most others, because it doesn't have an instruction sheet accompanying the model. But when you 've built more than a dozen of his models, you get the hang of it. This time no difference, with just a three-view of the plane at hand, it all worked out fine.
Here's a pic of the finished Fiat, the build pictures is after the jump.

Clear Skies, John.

Today, I was saddened by the news that one of my paper modeling friends passed away on April 11.  
John D. Jogerst, known to the paper model community as Yogi or Retired_for_now, was the person who welcomed me abord when I logged in for the first time on Papermodelers.com, the forum I joined ten years or so ago. John was a prolific paper model designer but remained very modest about his creations. He shared them with the community and many of his models are still available for free at Jonathan Leslies Lower Hudson Paper Model Gift Shop. In the time I started out in this hobby, I often made his models. They were well-designed and were easy to build. I have helped him test building four or five of his designs and I improved some of them with detail sets. We often emailed in those days and I considered him a friend, although he was living far away and I knwe almost nothing about his life and we would never meet. In his emails he often told about how he spent his time as a retiree in his community, Having fun with school children playing with his stomp rockets, donating his models to local museums and lovingly calling his wife "she who has to be obeyed", which I always found funny, him being a retired USAF colonel.

When he started to visit the forum less frequently, I sometimes emailed him to check up on how he was doing. He told me he just was enjoying his free time and found other things to keep him occupied.  I remember him as an eloquent and intelligent man with a kind and positive attitude.
The news of his passing really struck me, although we never met. 
Clear Skies, John.

Space Shuttle Endeavour with ET and SRB's in 1/96 [Part 6]

So right after posting the last installment, I took a long and hard look at the tank and decided it wasn't good enough by far. I carefully disassembled the cone from the ribbed intertank section and tried to do the same with the large part. That didn't go entirely well and I had to throw that part away. I could save the end cap, though.

This is what I ended up with after the demolishing:

And then the re-assembling started. I was a little worried that it would put me back at least a week. But did it? no. Well... read the rest. Then you 'll know.

Space Shuttle Endeavour with ET and SRB's in 1/96 [Part 5]

Now that the orbiter is finished, it was time to build the external tank. There is no single to-go model to base your build on, there have been at least six or seven variants of the external tank. And they sometimes even varied between one mission.
Now my intention never was to be 100% accurate. Moreso, I think rivet counters might not like my builds. I might have said this before but I like to build my models to look realistic but above all, they have to look good. They do not necessarily have to be 100% the same as the real thing but they got to create the impression they look the part.
Here is where I am now for those of you who are in a hurry, The rest of the story shows how I got there. 

It sure does look nice, huh? Why don't you read the rest of the story? There's a nice cliffhanger.

Space Shuttle Endeavour with ET and SRB's in 1/96 [Part 4]

Slow but steady. And almost doubled. That is how I could describe this build. There's plenty of other things going on as well, so that also might be a reason why the progress is at a slow pace.
But there is progress: Endeavour had been finished! It took some time and a lot of trial and error. Fortezza's shuttles aren't the easiest of models. The story is after the jump, here's a picture of Endeavour awaiting her launch configuration.

And the 'doubled' thing? well, this:

During this build, I started collecting my 'mistakes and errors' in a box on the side to have a little display of how much f8#kups I had during this build. Lots, at least with this one. Almost enough to build myself another shuttle. But one certainly learns from one's mistakes.

Space Shuttle Endeavour with ET and SRB's in 1/96 [Part 3]

The third installment is here. Looking back, I know I made a couple of small mistakes and the way I handled them was in hindsight a little unecessary. However, I think my solution looks better. I am talking about the position of the little NASA logo next to the United States sign on the side walls of the Shuttle. I didn’t study the parts well enough, otherwise I would have seen the logo was on the engine section, sticking out a little to go over the seam of the side walls and the engine section. I just shoved the text on the sides a little forward to make way for the logo. It now is not on the right spot but It also saved me the hassle of getting a more complex glue line.

I have had just a little progress but it was quite significant. I'll show you a progress picture here, the rest of the story follows below after the jump.

Piracy kills this hobby.

One of the best Dutch space model designers, Erik te Groen has permanently shut down his website. Reason: his freely available stuff was sold on the Chinese pirate website Alice papermodels. They take downloads of free models and sell these kits in their pirate webshop as printed packs for big prices. Not only Eriks stuff is found there, hundreds of model kits, created by numerous other designers, all their designed cars, planes, spacecraft, ships, planes, all models you can get (often for free) at the websites of the makers themselves, are being exploited by these Chinese criminals.
They themselves think it's all right, they don't see any copyright infringement because they are selling the models in print. But still they violate the creator's copyrights, because the designer didn't give them permission to sell the printed version.

Not only is this affecting the designers, it is affecting the whole community because those bastards simply cause some designers to stop designing and leave the hobby behind. Some have invented elaborate schemes to let people obtain their free models from their websites with passwords, quests and other methods, others simply delete their work and leave us behind with nothing. All because of these bastard Chinese pirates. 

What makes this hobby so great? Not just the paper modeling itself, It also is the free sharing of models. Great, superdetailed models of whatever you can think of. Models you'll never find in plastic. Models that are able to be build in big or smaller scales, depending on how you print them. Free models. Made by people who like to share them with the community. Something this pirate website is actively destroying by offering payed downloads of these free models they also got for free.

So be smart and save this hobby by looking for the proper places to download paper models and ignore Alice papermodel. Just don't go there and let them take advantage of other people's work.
Besides, how much of an idiot must one be to BUY a free model?

Space Shuttle Endeavour with ET and SRB's in 1/96 [Part 2]

And although I started off great and enjoyed myself a lot, I discovered the designer of the model made an error in the photographic skin. Endeavour should have had a small NASA meatball next to the "United States" sign on both of its sides. And since I also wasn't completely happy about the wings which showed just too much gap, it was first a visit to the Shop of Photos and then back to the cutting mat. Now I had two half-built shuttles laying on my desk. But the new wings were better. And today this is where I am: I glued the wing section to the payload bay and the cabin section!

Want to read and see more? Yes, you do. I know you do.

Westland Whirlwind (fighter plane) part 3

Yes, we're back at the Whirly for one last time. I have done one more model of the Westland Whirlwind and this time a little different. You could call it a study in aesthetics if you will. I printed another model but now on grey paper and I built it inside out, leaving off the propeller blades, the landing gear and by doing so reducing it just to its basic shape. More pics after the jump.

PS. There is news from the Space Shuttle frontier, more on that next week.

Space Shuttle Endeavour with ET and SRB's in 1/96 [Part 1]

After almost two years without spacecraft builds, I thought it might be time to return to my main interest: spaceflight. I chose to build something which was on my list from the beginning, an 1/96 Shuttle stack, to fit in with the rest of my rockets and launch vehicles.

I chose to do Raimondo Fortezzas’ shuttle model because it has a lot of detail. I have come to love the smaller-sized shuttle stack by Alfonso Moreno but I already have built that one four times (and I still have to build the Challenger in 1/400 to complete the series). Besides, it was time for a biggie. Here's a taste of what is to come, there's more if you read the rest of the story.

Westland Whirlwind (fighter plane) part 2

And here's number two. In a fictitious winter camouflage, the second Whirly faces its sister. The biggest difference between them apart from the colours is the wheel wells. There were made by using a template from the cut-out nacelle parts that indicate where the original parts for the gear bay doors would go. I added some side walls and voilà.
More of the build after the break.

Westland Whirlwind (fighter plane) part 1

Hi friends. There I am again. Firstly, a very prosperous 2019 for you all. All the best wishes and let's hope this year will be better than last year.

One day after my birthday, which was the 27th of October, I started working on Gerard Methorst’s Westland Whirlwind. The first thing I did was rescaling it to 1/48 to get a more common scale size, better fitting with my other big planes.

The end result it finally here, but it has been a long story. Click on 'the rest' if you're up for it. Lots of pictures too! I can tell you it was interesting, frustrating and yet also a lot of fun. This is the most intense build in the sense of working and changing and reshaping things I have ever done but it was certainly worth it.

A pretty little Whirly.