Thanks Guys!
I seemed to have missed an entire post from yesterday's work. So I'm adding it here in front of today's post. Both were pretty intensive sessions with lots of stuff to show.
First of all I edited the turret drawing to display the main deck and what lies above and below it. It was a suggestion by one of my many readers. It quickly tells the viewer just how much of this machine is below their feet.
I made that correction suggested on the write up to spell out "Port and Starboard" and avoid acronyms.
I took two steps forward and two steps back yesterday. I finally got the pan deck and electric deck to mate. After chopping and cutting all kinds of places on the e-deck, and still having the rocking to and fro, like there was a high spot somewhere buried inside, I decided to do some lateral thinking and check the pan deck base. And of course it was bowed out. It was this prominent bow that was created the interference. I should have relized this earlier, since the inner surface was bellied and the partitions had gaps that I had to fill... a lot. I used a sanding drum on the Dremel and knocked down most of the bulge on the ribs and lo and behold, the two gets finally got it together!
Another view:
I'm really having deja vu here... I know I wrote all this stuff yesterday and have no idea why it doesn't appear on any of the four forums to which I post. I do all the basic text here since Fine Scale has the most cumbersome photo upload, having to first load to a service and then to this site. All the other forums you can just drag an image from my files and drop it in.
I wanted to get the pan deck ready for paint, but that required doing the electrical work first. I'm using surface mount warm white LEDs driven by CL2N3 LED driver chips. These little marvels cost about $0.25 a piece. You pump in anything direct current voltage from 5 to 90 and out pops 20 milliamps, just what LEDs love. No worry about current limiting resistors. You can string the LEDs in series limited only by the input voltage drops across each LED. Generally they drop about 3 VDC so you can run a 4-LED string with one CL2 on a 12VDC power source. I'm using a 12VDC LED power supply from Amazon that cost about $15. I'm using them all over the place on my model railroad and have another as my LED test rig.
The circuit consists of self-adhesive copper foil tape with the LEDs soldered into little 1mm gaps. I mark which end is positive (+) and negative (–), and ensure that I'm soldering them in correctly. The contact pads underneath the LED is tiny, and the + is much smaller than the –. I run the circuit in a loop where I want the light to be and cut the notches. I use the continous corners that I was taught in installing burglar alarms in the late 1970s when we were using adhesive lead foil on windows to sense breakage. You bend the tape back on itself, then turn it 90 degrees to form a triangle and stick it to itself. I pre-tin both sides of the gap with enough solder to puddle a bit when I place the LED over the gap and heat the solder next to it. You don't heat the LED! They are temperature sensitve. I heat the foil next to it and let the solder, keep a little bit of pressure on the LED with a tweezers, and as soon as the solder melts and the LED drops into it, I take off the heat.
Here's the illuminated circuit. BTW: If you get the polarity reversed it doesn't damage the LED. They're diodes and simply block currect in the opposite directoion. These puppies are very bright and I may have to attenuated them by painting something on the lens. They are much brighter than they appear here. The wire is 30awg silicone insulated stranded. There's is very little current in this circuit and small wiring works perfectly.
And here's the e-deck lit. The translucency will be elimiated by the many coats of paint to follow. If it still shows up, I can back the panels with aluminum foil which totally blocks the light leakage. Half of this stuff will not be visible when the powder trunks go in.
Now to the ugly stuff.
I found that the boss on the bottom of the e-deck was completely off-center. The central hub was fine, but the surrounding circle was eccentric. I scribed a circle of what would be correct. I was going to attemp to repair it, but last night decided to print a corrected part which you will read about further down in today's post. Don't ask me how this could happen. I don't have a clue. Every (or nearly every) circle I draw in SU is concentric with others. It's very easy to do.
The other problem was the uneven wall height arround the pan deck perimeter. This had to be fixed. I used a surface gauge and scribed a line from the lowest wall point around the entire circumference. I then used an abrasive wheel in the Dremel and removed anything that was higher. It was a scary bit and could have wrecked the whole deal, but didn't. Today I trimmed all the rest of the stuff that was sticking up. I don't know what this amount of material removal is going to do with the final constuction. In actual practice the gun's recoil would possibly be too long for the ceiling height at full elevation. But I'm not elevating that high AND my guns can't fire and therefore can't recoil. And it may be a benefit. I may have made the elevating scews too short, but this extra 3/16" could be all I need to have them comfortably fit into the tilting boxes.
Today's post:
Still wrestling with the real world versus the 3D designed world. It's a shock when I find my brilliantly designed things don't quite translate into the solid objects of which this world is made. Case in point...
I decided to reprint the electric deck and the insert. There were aspects of both that could be improved and I had already drawn a later version of each. The big print worked overnight so it was waiting for me this morning. It wasn't bad although again it had large ribs in places that weren't on the design and again, I was able to surgically remove them without damaging what was there. The bottom of this new part did not have that off-center boss problem like the previous one did. In fact, it had no boss at all. Furthermore, to add to the fun, the center lug that sits on top of the central column, was not physically attached in the drawing and printed anywhere as a separate part. It was so well supported it just print right where it was, but fell off when I removed the support. I glued it back on with Gel CA.
I thought it was good that it didn't have a boss, but then found that when I assembled it with the projectile flat that lies below and added the projectile hoists, the electric deck was sitting about 0.080" above the projectile deck's inner drum held up by the projectile hoists. It NEEDED THE BOSS!
I made the boss out of a laminate of two pieces of 0.040" styrene, and attached it using 3M transfer adhesive tape. This stuff is contact cement that comes on a roll. I can be amazingly strong when applied to clean surfaces. The spacing is now corrected.
I spend more time on the projectile deck centers starting to get the powder hoists trunks final fit for installation. i also chose to install the other apparatus in these inner spaces. Visibility is terrible inside due to the vision blocks set up by the powder trunks. I suppose I could hack some material off of them to show what's behind, but I'm not inclined to do so.
I finished up leveling the wall tops of the pan deck and got it ready for paint by finish sanding and filling the outer surface. I double-checked the drawing and flat pattern created by the software to see if the errors were there. They were not! The entire length of the pattern was parallel. What I think happened were errors crept in during the bending and glue up. It's a conical shape and depending on how the final joining was made, it could have changed the height of the sides in places.
After sanding I went around and filled any gaps in the styrene-resin interface with Tamiya fine filler.
I took the pan deck outside and rattle-can sprayed it with Tamiya White Primer.
And after using Molotow Liquid Mask, I did the bottom.
I put a final coat of filler on a few missed spots and will sand that in tomorrow's session.
I'm going to paint the wall gloss white, the floor will be linoleum brown, with the apparatus painted medium gray. Ladders and projectile hoist trunks will be white.
Next up was the E-deck reprint. This print, besides missing the bottom boss, had the front bulkheads printed in place and they looked good (except for the middle piece of the front wall and two of the arms breaking off during cleaning). There was just one small problem. The pinion gears and their housings couldn't go into the space. Once in the space they would possible work, but I couldn't get them in there.
They fit in the drawing! That's becasuse, they aren't real and could move through the parts that were in the way into the space where they did fit.
It is essential that the pinions drop straight down into the space without a lot of wrangling. It's part of the entire pan deck structure and that's hard enough to get into place without having to hassle with the gears. So I took the router and removed the four inner bulkheads. I left the outer two in place. I will scratch-build them as I did with the last version, out of styrene spaced wide enough so the pinions fit
Re: the middle appratus print: The print was perfect except for a mal-formed wall and projectile hoist power unit that sits across one of the bulkhead openings. I will surgically remove the bad stuff and transplant a good from another print I have. NEVER EVER THROW AWAY REJECTS UNTIL YOU'RE ABSOLUTELY SURE YOU WON'T NEED THEM!
Tomorrow will be the last work session for over two weeks due to the Hawaii trip. I will still have access to the forums so I can respond to comments.