Moonbase Alpha exists as a colony on the moon partly in order to maintain a nuclear waste dump. Earth, by 1999, was powered almost exclusively by nuclear energy plants, and getting rid of the dangerous toxic waste became a problem. Why not just store it on the moon? Well why not?

In “Breakaway”, the first episode of Space 1999, Eagles are seen transporting and managing containers of radioactive waste. This waste builds up in energy and explodes in a massive nuclear blast that knocks the moon out of Earth’s orbit.

The Eagles used to transport these hold winches on a cargo flatbed with a magnetic winch head that picks up and deposits nuclear waste cannisters.

Konami, makers of a quite nice and sought-after 4″ Eagle model, made two pods for their model: A passenger pod and a Rescue pod. These are essentially the same pod with the exception that the Rescue pod has red stripes.

But they did not make any of the other pods the Eagle could be seen carrying in the TV show.

So I set out to make a Winch (often called Freighter) pod for this Konami Eagle.

I started by making a copy of the original pod (for scale and fit) so I could then use those dimensions to make further pods.

I decided to model my small Konami Freighter (Winch) pod after Product Enterprise’s 12″ Eagle model from a few years back, a gorgeously detailed model. They painted the winch barrels grey, so I made mine grey, though they appear to be white in the TV series.

Here is the Product Enterprise Eagle with Winch Pod (Product Enterprise called this the Eagle Freighter)

Here, then, is the progress I made in the past two days on my Winch Pod:

Here are all the parts: Winch Barrel bodies, Winch Barrel heads (two different per barrel), plugs to make the heads fit on the bodies, four Legs, four Engine Cones, two Rectangles (no idea what purpose they serve) for the pod flatbed, the Pod Flatbed itself, and the Winch Holding mechanism, and finally at the top, the superstructure holding it all together.

(Note: The superstructure is not shaped like this, but for this small Eagle, this made more sense. The front and rear baffle walls are completely open in the real deal, with piping acting like a scaffold for strength. My printer would not print those with any consistency or neatness, so I abandoned that idea for this one, which works, and looks pretty good when the pod is installed in the Eagle, as you will see.)

Here, the four engine cones and four legs are installed on the underneath of the flat bed.

The two rectangles are placed, with small plugs underneath for alignment. The winch holding mechanism is placed in the center, with a similar plug to align it to the flat bed.

Here I put the caps on the winch barrels. These are two identical barrels, which are turned at 180 degrees to each other when on the Eagle.

The caps are printed separately because the barrel is printed vertically, and the cap detail would disappear if it had to be printed on the bottom of a single-piece barrel.

Four plugs are used to align the parts.

Here the winch barrels are glued in place.

And the superstructure is glued in place, which allows the pod to attach to the Konami Eagle:

NOTE: For anyone who buys these models from me at my shop (Fourth D) on Shapeways, you may want to print the decal sheet I created. The two links below are to PDF files you can print.

Pod-Decals-Better-Layout

Pod-Decals-Instructions

You can print them on white waterslide paper either in laser or inkjet (make sure you have the right paper and follow instructions that come with the paper) or you can print them on simple white paper and use simple glue if you like. The decal sheet has both the Konami and Dinky scaled decals. Also, the instructions for the decals (for waterslide) are available here.

Konami, a Japanese company, has made an amazing collection of vehicles and figures from Gerry Anderson’s body of work. These are small models, about 4 inches or less, and gorgeously detailed.

I have had the Eagle with Rescue Pod from Space 1999 for some time now, seen here, mounted on a display base I created in my 3D printer some time ago:

This one came in a two-set box along with the SID satellite from the TV show UFO.

Last week I happened upon the rarer white version (no stripes on the pod). It hit me then that these are the only two Eagles Konami made, but there are others Eagles in the Moonbase Alpha fleet.

Well, first, the Eagle itself (the lifting body) is standard, but can be made to carry different pods. The red striped one is a Rescue Pod, the white one is a standard passenger mission pod. There are also a VIP pod (essentially the same pod with orange detail), a Laboratory Pod, which has extensions to either side and extra attitude jets, and a Freighter pod, used to carry nuclear waste around the moon.

So I set out to create extra pods for my Eagles. First up, a replica of the passenger pod.

I iterated through many variations of the model, tweaking it for fit and detail. At this size (4cm long) the tiny detail tends to get lost with my printer. But I made some adjustments to accentuate the details. It’s still not perfect, but here is the result, which isn’t bad, if I must say so myself.

Here, I assemble the “model kit” I created.

Here are the various parts as they came off the printer. There is extra “rafting” material underneath all of the parts. Here you see the pod upper body, the pod bottom (printed separately to retain detail), four legs, four engine cones, and a bunch of window inlays.

Here, the rafting material and support scaffolding (supporting the roof overhangs) are pulled away.

Here you see all of the parts, cleaned up and separated from their rafting bases.

Here, the four engine cones and four support legs are glued in place. The windows are all pieces designed to fit into deep holes in the pod’s upper part.

And here the 12 windows are glued in place.

The assembled bottom, glued to the assembled top.

And here it is docked with the Eagle. The white is not a match, but I intend on priming and painting later versions of these.

Et voila! The Eagle, with my pod in place, next to the original white pod.

Today I had some time so I got myself busy working on a couple of projects I’d been meaning to do for a while.

The first was to make a profile image of myself and lathe it around to form one of those urn profile busts that are seen in optical illusion shots:

So I got Carol to take a direct profile picture of my face:

I brought it into my 3D modeling program and drew the profile, lathing it around 360 degrees. (Not a terribly flattering picture, I know. But it was just for this project.

I won’t reveal quite yet what the result was, because then I did a second Lazy Sunday project:

This is a TeeFury T-Shirt I bought last year that I really loved:

So I set out to create the Space Invaders / TRON Recognizer mash-up in the shirt.

And here are the results of both projects. (The robots on the left were other Lazy Sunday and Snow Day projects.)

Not really a snow day. I mean it snowed today, but I had booked the day off anyway.

I spent a lot of it making the next rocket in my fleet.

This is a Fathers Day Card Charlotte gave me some years ago. I kept it because I really loved it, and I am a big fan of retro-styled rocket ships.

Obviously it is stylized, and shows only two fins. This would not work as a real rocket, and if I decided to be literal, it would fall over. So I opted to go with 3 fins, with the windows being in the span between, making for 3 windows, six rows of rivets, and 3 fins.

Here is the 3D model. I have not yet printed any of this. I will post pics when I do.

Well, I test-printed the rocket. It was a bit smaller than I want the final to be, but it’s not bad. Here it is, pictured next to the card that inspired it:

A few minor adjustments to make, including making the insert cuts for the fins a bit deeper, and to scale it up maybe 1.2.

The proportions may look wrong but that’s only because you’re seeing a 2D model become 3D. The contours of the body, the height of the nose cone and the windows, the fin shape, are all modeled against the photo in Maya so they are very accurate. Even the number of rivets going down the body is accurate.

As some of you may know, I entered three design contests at 3DAGOGO in December. Turns out I won all three, and won two reels of filament and a 3D scanner!

But I also won three t-shirts declaring the win. Like a trophy.

I really liked the cool rocket ship and thought, you know what would make a better trophy?

Exactly.

Today New England got socked with yet another snow storm and the weather reports were so bad for later in the day that driving would be dangerous. So my company shut down for the day.

I took the opportunity to watch a movie or two (“Battleship” which is universally panned, but I don’t know why. I rather enjoyed it.)

But during the day while doing various other things, I sat down and modeled the rocket seen on the 3DAGOGO shirt.

Here is the first test-print, which is about 6.5cm tall. It was a proof of concept, printed in my go-to test color, neon yellow (so the photo sucks. This color just does not photograph well.)

Concept proofed, I went to work printing the five-color rocket ship, starting with yellow, which had the most parts, but not before doubling the scale.

Here are all the parts laid out:

Here, I have assembled the main body in orange, the top red body section and yellow nose cone:

Here, I have glued on the bottom red section with the engine cowl in silver:

Then the fin section snaps into the grooves of the engine cowl:

Then the orange engine section snaps onto the remains of the fins:

Not shown well here, the engines themselves (the ring of yellow circles above – a slight embellishment on my part since the T-shirt is very vague on this area) are glued to the bottom section and a strong rubber band is used to clamp the pieces together while the Krazy Glue sets. Meanwhile I glued the blue window “glass” into the yellow window frames:

Then the windows are glued in place and clamped:

The finished model next to the test-print. Believe it or not, the larger one is 2x the size of the smaller one but looks quite bigger:

And here I placed the model rocket on the shirt above the graphical version. I think I nailed it! If you think the fins don’t angle back enough, you may be right, and my next version may address that, but I think it’s mostly due to the angle of the photo. In the shirt graphic, it’s angled back more, and the fins disappear into the perspective cone towards the back. The plastic model doesn’t, not at this angle, but does at others.

I have printed probably hundreds, if not thousands of individual things on my Afinia H479 printer. And I’ve learned some things that make printing easier with better results.

Today I’m going to talk about how the printer prints, and why it can cause issues when printing multiple small parts.

When the Afinia prints layers it often runs through the layer in a particular order. Then when it begins printing the next layer, it does this layer in reverse, which works. Or for that matter it may not be exactly in reverse, but it does often print the next layer starting with the part it just left, meaning it prints twice on that one part in short order.

To create the part, the order of printing really doesn’t matter – except it does.

It matters when at the end of a layer the bed drops to the next layer and begins printing with the same part again. This means if you had, say, six equal cylinders of just a few .mm in diameter, it goes around to each cylinder, prints that layer’s circle, moves on to the next. But at the end of the layer it prints one cylinder’s circle, the bed drops a layer’s height, and it prints on the same cylinder again without giving that previous layer any time to cool, then goes through all of the other cylinders in reverse order of the previous layer.

One of the things that makes for a more accurate, more precise print is cooling time. If the head lays down a layer on Cylinder A and then goes to B, C, D, E, F and G, the plastic on each of those cylinders gets some cooling time before the head comes around again with its molten plastic. However, the way the software prints layers means that G now gets two layers at a time. The first layer has not had time to cool before the second layer comes down. Then it goes back G through A, and prints A twice. So cylinders A and G can end up with slightly gummy layers where two layers printed right after each other.

I first noticed this when printing posts for my Thunderbird 3 variant rocket design I made very shortly after I got my printer.

The first thing I noticed is that after some shorter parts had printed, the taller posts got very gummy at the top, like they had lost their shape entirely. It didn’t take long to figure out that the reason was the cylinder printed in sequence until the shorter parts were done, then the head just kept going over and over this one post, and the result was like melted plastic.

These two photos depict the problem very clearly:

But I also noticed when I printed this part for someone else’s redesigned Thunderbird 3, it had three posts with some separation between them. Note how in this photo you can see they printed very precisely, without the gumming. Even in this model, one or two of the three cylinders got the multi-print treatment.

I soon began to print things with one superfluous piece on the print bed. This piece was thin, and taller than all of the others, and its purpose was to give the printer something to waste time on. When the head prints the layer of the parts I want, it is forced to go print this thing. This gives the plastic on the wanted pieces time to cool while the head went off to print this unwanted thing. And since it’s taller, it completely finishes my good parts and goes on to gum up this taller useless piece, and when the print stops, it doesn’t stop hot on one of my parts leaving that tiny hair of plastic on it to clean up.

I call this superfluous part a lightning rod. Consider that its purpose is to stand taller than its surroundings and stop them from taking damage from the hot thing.

Here, you see a lightning rod in use. (It has more detail than it needs because it is an actual part I need, but not for this print run. I used the software’s scaling tools to make it thin and taller than the main parts I’m printing.)

(It didn’t have to be quite this tall… I just got lazy. It really only needs to be one or two layers above the main parts you are printing. But that’s hard to gauge in the view window, so I play it safe.)

Now when I print multiple parts, I always print a lightning rod. The wasted time and plastic are not a concern to me. The rod is usually a very thin thing that I toss away after printing, but is thick enough to stand up to a tall print, but not thick enough to waste much plastic. More plastic is usually used on the raft than the lightning rod and I always end up with cleaner parts.

I am also going to use this knowledge to ask Afinia to provide a print mode that does not reciprocate adjacent layers, so that every layer goes around in the same direction. This will completely eliminate the problem of having one part get two layers in a row, thus making for a more mushy print.