Just finished the tow bar. To recap briefly, this thing connects the tug to the ground handling unit and is used alone to allow the tug to drag around large aerospacecraft that have nose wheels. If you’re wondering why I’m even bothering with that point and why I didn’t just make the tow bar a directly integrated part of the ground handling unit, there are 3 reasons:
- The real thing is a standalone item too.
- I intend to do an airliner-style passenger craft with removable top panels that will look sort of like a sawed-off baby Boeing 747 with stubby wings and vectoring engines. It will have a nose wheel. (This is also where the requested luxury interior comes in.)
- It’s also an ambience filler item for the equipment sheds I want to do in the spaceport structure set.
Picture time!
Don’t worry about how polygonal the wheels look, they’re actually pretty small and I didn’t want 48 tiny-ass little glue flaps on wheels of that size. They will look considerably rounder in real life when you build them the right way: don’t score across the treads, only across the glue flaps, then just curve the tread strip into a circle and close up the sides.
Next up on the model list: I gotta finish the ground handling unit. There’s not that much texturing left to do on it!
Update: Just shipped the files for the towbar. I’m off to bed now.
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I just got the towbar files and printed out a copy of the parts. The tug looks great and went together without any problems.
Thanks for test building the tug!
I just built a towbar. The finished model looks pretty cool hooked up to the tug, but I’ll tell you what, those wheels were just enough of a challenge that I was thankful for 2 things: the fact that the towbar only needed two wheels, and that I own a pair of #7 tweezers.
I’ll try to get to it tomorrow.
I’m currently addicted to killing Klingons on Star Trek online.
By the way, what happened to the Space Port financial support page?
I keep getting a 404 error.
It’s still there, I’m not sure why you’re seeing a 404. I did clean up the page title the other day, so if you’re visiting it from a different link, that might be why. Can you go there from the navigation menu at the top of the page and see if it’s still showing a 404 for you?
OK, that one at the top is working.
I used a link from inside your blog post that gave me the 404 error.
I also just reposted that top link in my Infinity post about your model.
D’oh! Yeah, good catch–I just went in and fixed all the busted links. Thanks for spreading the word!
–•I intend to do an airliner-style passenger craft with removable top panels that will look sort of like a sawed-off baby Boeing 747 with stubby wings and vectoring engines. It will have a nose wheel. (This is also where the requested luxury interior comes in.)–
Got to get me one of those!
Nice build. Fairly easy. It is easier with a very sharp and pointed blade and flatnose tweezers. Nothing to comment on. Great job!
Did mine too. Pretty quick and simple, except for the wheels. (I don’t have any smallnose tweezers; generally an old pair of stamp tongs works for me, but not really this time.)
I hope that any wheeled spacecraft have nice fat tires!
Phaze3: Thanks for putting one together!
Carl: Oh, yeah. The wheels for the large passenger craft will be nice and big, at least 0.75 to 1.25″ in diameter or larger. As for the smaller business jet types, I’m going to make an earnest effort to make them bigger than those little ones on the towbar, but it’s kind of a balancing act. Too big and it looks hilariously toylike, too few segments and they look polygonal, make them flat and they start looking like somebody stabbed some pizza cutters into the underside of the fuselage.
At least for me, it wasn’t the diameter of the wheels that was the problem.
I spent a bunch of time a week or so back building crates, barrels, boxes etc; stuff to clutter up warehouse scenes. Among other things, I built a bunch of drums that I found on the Ebbles disk. (With both them, and a bunch of Dave Graffam’s more archaic barrels, I used your wheel technique. That is; though they were designed to be octagonal prisms I ignored the longitudinal score lines and built them as cylinders. It worked quite well, thank you very much.) They were smaller in diameter, but easy to build.
So, as long as the wheels are fairly thick, I’m not too worried about diameter. (And balloon tires in landing gear don’t strike me as unreasonable.)
Oh, okay, gotcha.