Early SF, MON Space Station

[SJPONeill]

Originally Posted by Diderick A. den Bakker

Back to the model in hand - or rather, in view of the size, in two hands. In spite of a bad head cold I have made some progress. I don't think the designer of this model ever heard of the word 'fit'... it is all very crude. I keep filling large gaps with white glue. The four spokes turned out to be at least a centimeter too long... The solar energy collector is coloured on one side only, so the model will have to be viewed from the top only. The parts are too large to use aquarel paint on them: they would certainly buckle as the paint dried, so I am not going to try.

That's looking good, Diderick and I'm pleased that continuance of your build has been OK'd as these MON kits are too good to be stuffed away on a dark shelf somewhere.

Re the solar collector only being printed on one side, I wondering if it would be possible to construct another shell, maybe with a girder pattern, for the reverse side?

[Diderick A. den Bakker]

I got sidetracked by some Vintage models, and by my Flickr 'New Photo Collection' (4000 visitors in just three months - have a look, and send your own photo's: Flickr: Den Bakker's Photostream ). But I have now made some progress on the space station. As I wrote before - it is a very crude model, bad fit everywhere, large gaps have to be filled with extra bits of paper and lots of white glue - but in spite of this, it is an amusing model. The main construction is now complete - only to find that the round domes at top and bottom of the central axis are not included in the parts. One is expected to fashion them out of balsa. A designer friend is working on a paper construction for me.

[Diderick A. den Bakker]

As you may have noticed, the Space Station got delayed. I did not much enjoy building it - terrible fit, huge gaps had to be filled with white glue, the large energy collector was a headache... So I did several little things in between (mainly from the Vintage threads on this forum). I also spent a lot of time collecting photo's for my Flickr: Den Bakker's Photostream site - over 6800 visitors so far!! Please send me pictures of your own favourite models. Don't be shy: I do not want it to be top builders and top photographers only. As long as the pictures are sharp, and as long as you enjoyed the build!
Back to our Artifical Moon. I completed the two domes - the picture shows a technique I picked up in a paper model museum in Heidelberg, Germany. Connect the petals to each other on the inside with strips of thin paper, let dry and harden. Then start filling the whole thing up with wads of tissue paper, soaked in (non-water based!) glue. While the glue is not quite dry, you can still mold the dome. Allow to dry, continue the process, then allow to dry and harden. You will end up with a perfect, hard and strong dome.
I had to colour the underside of the energy collector - not a very good idea, because some of the panels buckled, as you can see in the picture... then I improvised some antenna's, and the thing is finished. It is ca. 35 cms across.
I am now looking forward to building Space Station V (2001, A Space Odyssey), designed by Martin Sänger and available from the Downloads section.

[Pat_craft]

Great model !!! I would have liked to design it !

[Diderick A. den Bakker]

Anyone interested in my Early SF posts will like to know that the Cosmostrator (also designed by Jo Sutton) is now available via Ecardmodels.