Throwing My 32" Into the Ring

[daverep]

Okay, I've waited long enough...

So, here's my entry into the 32" Falcon builds. To start off, I'm using joewhite's cutting patterns that he derived from J. Maruska's drawings. Joe I gotta thank you man for all of your help on this! I definitely wouldn't have tackled this if you hadn't emailed me those plans!

Even though both Joe's plans and the Maruska drawing were designed for laser cutting parts, I don't have access to anything like that, so I'm cutting everything by hand which is a huge trial & error process. It still works, though. Well, at least so far it has!

So here are the pics. My apologies there are so many of them right from the start. I've been working on this for a couple of months off and on.

I cut Joe's pattern out and laid it on top of two .06 styrene sheets taped together. Then cut it out.




Top and bottom cut out.


Next...to the ribs. These weren't fun especially cutting them by hand but I know they're going to be much more fun than doing the plating.


I've read on other threads that it's best to sand them down to make sure they're all pretty close to the same size and curvature, but I've noticed that some of those suggestions came after they attached the ribs to the hull, so I decided to tape them all together and then sand them. I figured it'd be much easier doing it that way. Here they are sanded down as best as I could get them.


So, here comes my first mistake in this process (one of a few so far and probably one of many more), I attached the ribs before I did the center bracing. My logic was that I'd put the ribs in first and then allow the natural curvature to help me in creating the center circle. I figured the circle I drew would be okay.



Well, in trimming the ribs to match, I trimmed them a bit too far which left me with gaps in some that caused them not to reach the circle bracing. So, I cut shims that helped connect them to the circle, but I also found out that the shims helped to strengthen the whole structure a bit more. I'd still do this again if I was ever crazy enough to try to build a second Falcon. But I'd also create my center ring first.


So the top and bottom hulls are ribbed and I'm ready to move on.


In Joe's pattern files, he created some ribbing for the docking tunnels. So, I traced his pattern and cut them out.



The idea behind this is to build the docking tunnels first, before skinning the Falcon and cutting the skin around the docking tunnels. I'm thinking about doing the same thing for the other structures on the hull.

Because I didn't think ahead, I had to remove some of the hull ribbing in order to work with the docking tunnel structure.




I thought it might help if I add a bit more to what Joe did just to make things square and give it just a bit more structure.



But I realized that I probably had overbuilt the area and went with a simpler approach.




So this morning I glued the pieces together to see how they fit onto the hull. I think this is going to work, so I'll make three more to fill out the Falcon.




And here it is sitting in the hull.



I'm not going to permanently attach it to the hull just yet. I'll put them in and then start working on skinning the hull just to make sure everything fits properly. I'm hoping to have all of those finished by this evening since I've figured out my process of making these.

Thanks for looking!
- Dave