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Old 02-19-2018, 08:29 AM
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Tonino Tonino is offline
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I would suggest to cut away some of the grey areas from the struts and pipes (where possible).
It involves a lot of blade-work (and several dioptres lost) but it's worth the effort, in my opinion.
The resulting pieces are somewhat weaker, but with some extra attention (especially at the end of the work when you will move the model from one expo to the other...) you can avoid any damage.

A different question are the grey areas in leg struts junctions (see, in photo #1, leg parts in background. I even tried to darken the grey areas but didn't like very much the result). These spots are zones where many forces converge and grey areas was added to strenghten the general structure.
Cutting them away could lead to a catastrophic collapse of the entire landing gear under LM own weight.

I was very doubtful whether cut those areas away or not. I finally choose to reduce grey areas considerably (see photo #3 and 4) and, after build, I reinforced all the struts, especially in the junction points, with a mixture of white glue and water (invisible once dried, see last photo).

Eventually the legs held the weight very well and now, after more than a year of standing, no trace of failure seems to appear (so far...).

Consider that I built the model in his original scale, perhaps my findings doesn't apply to an enlarged build...
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Apollo 13 LM-7 Aquarius-dsc06942.jpg   Apollo 13 LM-7 Aquarius-dsc07121.jpg   Apollo 13 LM-7 Aquarius-dsc06946a.jpg   Apollo 13 LM-7 Aquarius-dsc06946b.jpg   Apollo 13 LM-7 Aquarius-dsc07109.jpg  

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