Gene's Viper-in-a-month - NEW Photos on page 14 !!!

[GKvfx]

Originally Posted by REL

Gene, you can use Warm White LED's, they reproduce the look of the old light bulbs used on the studio models, not the blueish white like the white LED's..............

I have some of those, and I'm not entirely sold on them. I'm OK with them inside a regular model, or maybe for fiber optics, but for this application I really wanted something with a glass envelope.

Originally Posted by Mr. Wabac

........are you saying that the custom armature simply didn't have the port mounting block ? Looking at one of your photos it looks like the circular cutout for the port mount is there on the casting..............

It appears that for the side mount, there was an additional block just like the one that is used for the top/bottom mount, but rotated 90 degrees and aligned to the port engine. There is a scribe hole on the port intake of the casting where the mount hole would be (or may have been), but I decided not to open it up. Not all the Vipers had side mounts. In fact, I'm not sure all of the Vipers had armatures. For one scene a couple of Vipers are mounted on a piece of plexi rod. The resin weighs next to nothing when compared to the armature and I'm sure the foam parts of the original were even lighter.

Now for a brief break in the Viper - an intermission of sorts. Carson Dyle and I went to a screening of ALIENS over here is Santa Monica tonight and Jim Cameron showed up for the Q&A after the movie. He talked for about 45 minutes and then went back to the set of AVATAR. Since I have no shame and no pride whatsoever left after nearly 20 years in the movie business (and because Carson dared me to do it), I'm posting this photo -



Rob got a chance to mingle with the celebrities too. Here he is chatting it up with Yoda -


Thanks for all the comments (yeah, even Otist's). More on the Viper this weekend.

Gene

[3D-builder]

Gene I found this stuff last year in the auto body section, it was mad expensive around $14.00 a can then, not sure what it is now.It has a sweet smell for sure!!

[Carson Dyle]

I'm pretty sure "Yoda" guy was Howard Hughes.

He kept going on about how Avatar was being filmed in roughly the same spot the Spruce Goose was built.

I might not have made the Hughes connection, but that cup he's seen holding was filled with urine.

[Wombat]

This is just such a cool piece.
First it's an actual cast from an original mould and now ya got the armature and full lighting going in.
Mate this is just a ripper of a build and ya doing an excellent job with it.
Thanks for posting sharing so many great pictures of the build up!

[rider]

Originally Posted by The Cat

Thank. You. So. Much. For. Sharing. This.!!!

Ditto

[adama]

This is the kind of thread that makes me giddy. GIDDY! Good stuff Gene, amazing!

[GKvfx]

Fuselage is secured to the armature and wings are glued in place. I'm looking at it now - mounted on a model mover originally used for CE3K that Universal Hartland inherited. Damn I like this design.

Film at 11.

Gene

Few quick photos before the next update -

[79 daytona]

Man that looks so COOL!!!

Say i was just wondering and its no big deal and it may be the way iam looking at the pic's but do you think the wing need to be angled down just a little bit more from the pic it looks like the wing are almost straight.

[GKvfx]

Originally Posted by 79 daytona

Man that looks so COOL!!!

Say i was just wondering and its no big deal and it may be the way iam looking at the pic's but do you think the wing need to be angled down just a little bit more from the pic it looks like the wing are almost straight.

Yeah, I'm going to take a closer look at that tonight. I noticed the same thing this morning when I took the pictures. I tried to make a jig, but it was hard to get it to stay in place. I wound up eye-balling them. They are in a straight line front to back, and the blocks are glued down to the body of the fuselage. (If I had tilted the edges of the wings 'down' any more, there would have been a gap on the top portion of the wing block.) Theoretically, they should be at 120 degree intervals - (360 divided by 3). I was so tired when I got this done, I just let it sit.

Gene

[GKvfx]

79daytona was right - the wings were a bit off.

The blue lines on the diagram below are 120 degrees apart. The dashed lines represent the line of the wing.


As you can see, the Port wing (on the right side of the diagram, since the nose is pointing to the camera) is pretty close - closer than I thought I would get by eyeballing it. But the Starboard wing is way off.


The only solution was to break off the Starboard wing and re-glue it. I guess in the back of my mind, I chose to use cyano in case I had to break something off. It took a bit of work, but I got a somewhat clean break.

Luckily, I didn't wind up breaking the fuselage. The sound of cracking glue seams and breaking resin are incredibly similar and equally unnerving.

I re-glued the wing with a bit more tilt. I suspect the wings aren't identical (like you would get if you laser cut them today), so they don't quite line up perfectly.

But, looking at this, there is a better symmetry now so I guess it was worth it.

The only thing that is left over is a bit of a gap along the wing root that I now have to fill in.

I'll probably just stick a piece of strip styrene in there to camouflage it. Not accurate, but it will have to do.

I still have a few little details to add on (canopy rails and hatch covers) but I'm hoping to have the base coats and all the stripes (gray and orange) on the model by day's end on Saturday.

Gene

[79 daytona]

That looks GREAT!!! I know it was a pain to redo the wings, and i've been down that road before. I can't wait to see what it looks like with the base coat . And again outstanding work!!

[thunderbearr]

If at first you don't succeed...

Snap it off and glue it on right!

Great job so far!

I hate you.

[GKvfx]

Couple of small things here before I get involved with the paint.

The intakes on this thing are a bitch. Quite frankly, that's one of the nice things about the Salzo version - the intakes are a separate assembly and whatever cleaning up you need to do can be done easily. On the actual casting, the body and the intakes are integral and it makes cleanup tricky.

Some of the 'real' Vipers had open intakes. There wasn't anything to see back there, but they were open. Others appear to have been opened, but then covered. And a few, the ones that I suspect might be solid foam, are just solid.

It looks like the intakes on this casting were clayed up for molding. As such, they weren't particularly smooth. (I'm just talking about the face of the intakes - what will be black on the model). Since opening them up would be a pain, I decided to try and level things out as much as possible with a Dremel and sandpaper.




The little details on the sides are track links from the Italieri T-34 that donates its mufflers to the engines. Some 'real' Vipers have them, others don't. I replaced the molded in blobs with real kit parts.





I'm not looking forward to taping off the openings to paint them.

Opening up the fuselage to get the armature inside wasn't particularly difficult - just tedious and messy. I did most of the body work with the hollow casting intact because I knew that I would be handling it a lot and it was stronger when it was one piece. Once I 'gutted' it, I was afraid I was going to snap something off. (I've actually assembled another one of these castings for a buddy, so I have a bit of experience to play with.)





Once it was opened up, I still had to spend time sanding down the inside of the engine section so the armature would fit. This casting was done without the benefit of a an inner core mold, so the wall thicknesses varied. In fact, so tight was the fit that no glue whatsoever was required to secure the armature in place. I didn't believe it when I was told that no glue was needed, but sure enough, it's just a friction fit.





Once the armature is fitted, the Viper becomes a fairly heavy piece. I'm still paranoid that I'm going to drop the thing.

The wings got added next, and I tried something different here. On the Jim Key casting I got years ago, I put pins in the wings, and tubes in the body. this allowed me to have removable wings and made things easier to paint. On the other casting + armature that I built, I just tried using thicker pins. That wasn't too successful as the bras engine cans got in the way and the resin was only about 1/16" thick at the at point. Not enough meat to be sturdy.

This time around, I tried making a biscuit joint - like in carpentry. I milled out a slot in both the wing and the fuselage to glue in the thick piece of styrene.




This strip was then trimmed down to fit in the slot on the fuselage.




Once everything was sized, I used copious amounts of CA to glue it down. Still, there isn't really a whole lot of meat to glue down. And if you read my previous post, you'll see how that was actually an advantage.

I'm working on the pilot and canopy (which has something like 16 pieces of its own) and I'll post that stuff later.

Gene

PS:

Originally Posted by thunderbearr

I hate you.

Yeah, me too. Gene

[The Cat]

Thank you, Gene!

[Peagis]

Wow!!