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.

Of course, the first new thing I made right after where I ended my last post, were the OMS pods. Second try, always better.

The pods are complex shapes, the RCS thruster units being attached to the main shape of the pods themselves. But they look good when finished. I used my ball-on-a-stick-tools for smoothening the sharp folds in the pods which are there after glueing. 

Next were the engine bells of the SSME's (Space Shuttle Main Engines) or RS-25, as they are known nowadays. Inner engine bell cone and an outer composite shape go together and then, for added detail, you have to cut out the coolant tube system around the outside of the engine bell. Now that is some job. Sharp new blade and there we go.

I painted the cut out structure with gun metal acrylic paint, to highlight them a little more. The engines should go into the holes at the back, together with some rudimentary paper flap spring mechanism to make the bells moveable. But why? It isn't a toy. I already regretted the moveable wing flaps, so I decided to glue the engines in place. But the top of the engines bells is quite crude. Not the tiny peep hole you see when looking at the real engines. Something you still could see when the engines were assembled. So I made a little top for the engines which resulted in a more realistically looking appearance.

The new top ends resulted in that I needed a deeper hole to insert the engines in, so I drilled/sanded holes in the engine block with my power tool.

The stack will be displayed as it is right before launch, so the RCS thrusters in the nose and at the OMS pods should be covered with the paper(?) covers that fly off when the stack is lifting off the pad. I made this out of blotting paper. I even tried to make the bags that, filled with the wind from lifting off, pull the covers off of the RCS thrusters.

The only thing left to do are the payload bay doors (PBD). These weren't included in the kit (I just re-read the thread on Papermodelers in which the designer of this photorealistic version posted his three comments ever on the forum, and he apologised for leaving them out). Now, I didn't want them to be moveable, the stack is vertical, so I photohopped a new version of the doors, together and created the photoreal textures on the doors, using other shuttle areas as samples.

After one failed try, I made the doors fit snugly in their location between cabin and engine block. Looking impressively good, in spite of the small mistakes.

Finally, there she is. Endeavour is ready. Now the External Tank. And I have started building. I use Bill Spencer's model, which I enlarged to 1/96. (the kist says it is 1/100 but enlarging it 104% isn't right, it is still too small. I figured out 105.69% is the right size. I use coloured card for the tank, 270 gram paper, very heavy and hard to bend, especially larger parts. But the cone is as good as ready. I was thinking about how to give the tank the right look of sprayed-on insulation foam. And I already thought it perhaps could be done wit sanding off the top layer of paper. It came in handy, because it also got rid of - or rather camouflaged - the seams in the rings that make up the cone.

So there we are. Hopefully next post is a little sooner.
See you!
--PK