Joining the 32" Falcon club

[daverep]

Okay...first my apologies. I'm dead tired from working on this stuff early this morning and I'm literally going to copy/paste my RPF post. I don't typically do that, but I'm fried.

Here's what Joe and I have been working on. Last night when I got home I saw his thread about possibly having an issue with the cutting plans he derived from the Maruska drawings. I've been using Joe's patterns to build my own Falcon and have also been using the Maruska drawings as well.

So, I thought we should probably compare all of the drawings by overlaying them onto each other. I've got experience in Illustrator and could do that. So, I created a simple version of the studioscale drawing and placed the Maruska Falcon on top of it to compare the dimensions.



I also wanted to show both versions side by side.

Next, I took Joe's cutting pattern he derived from the Maruska drawing and laid the studioscale on top of that. Sadly it was really early in the morning this morning when I did that and forgot to save it out. But what I did do before all of that is create an image that had all three...Joe's cutting pattern, the studioscale pattern and Maruska's pattern. They all matched perfectly.



The nice thing is that the studioscale pattern had the equator sidewalls and I was able to determine earlier in the week with Joe that, based on some of the parts listed on mensaboy's part maps, the walls should indeed be inset by 1/2".

Next I wanted to help solve Joe's problem with the port-side mandible being too small. I noticed that on the Maruska drawing, that since he wasn't creating a pattern as such, he didn't continue the mandible wall up to the equator wall. Which is correct, because the way he drew them, the hull hides that. So, I decided to continue the wall up until it meets that circle that makes up the equator wall.



Joe took a look at it and determined that Maruska's drawings are accurate based on the port sidewall map. What threw him off, and you can sort of see it in the above image is that on the port side-view of Maruska's drawings he didn't include the intersecting point of the straight sidewall to the curved equator wall. I drew some rough lines to show where these points are. But when I created the line for that intersection, you see that I drew it over the side wall.

So, I think we've determined that the Maruska drawings are very accurate. I've been working on my own build and can tell you that the parts fit very snugly. I'm unlucky enough to not have access to any laster cutters, so I've been doing this by hand and the drawings/template are spot on. Just wish my cutting was!

Hopefully I've explained it well enough. I'm pretty delirious right now with only a couple hours of sleep and on top of that, I'm working on one hell of a cold. So, I'll get my thread going tomorrow night.

I may work on it a bit more so I can have more pics to put up.

Thanks all!
-Dave