With Mary starting training for her new job this week,
I've taken the opportunity of some "alone" time to really
pound away at the pod. Huge amount of progress done in the last few days
...
- I've padded the armrests.
- Incorporated the support buttresses to the sides
and front of the cockpit well.
- The front supports double as the footwell.
- Neither support actually touches the control
consoles. This is because I wanted to be able to shim the
consoles since I don't know exactly how thick the lightsheet
will be.
- The supports also double as the main supports
for the ceiling / wall assembly (or at least they will once the
wall/ceiling assembly is complete).
- Added a couple of cross-members to the forward edge
of the cockpit well. One (seen clearly in "Another view of the
well.") serves to hide the lighting, etc. from the door and
expand the thickness of the consoles. The other (see "The 'raw'
cockpit well") is a c-shaped clamp that holds the cockpit
together side-to-side. The plastic apparently warped a bit in the
3,000 years since I last worked on this and it didn't want to retain
shape properly to latch onto the consoles.
- The consoles are glued together rather than simply
taped for shape testing. Combination of micro-weld and epoxy was
used for all acrylic bonds.
- They are now a single unit that will be lit and
covered with overlays before being installed.
- The very front console panel is still left off
as it has to be modified to follow the shape of the window -
can't do this until I can do another test fit with the
ceiling/walls.
- The rear walls have been glued to the (newly
revised) antechamber walls. Got a bit too gung-ho last night and
stuck on the top-most pieces of the rear walls. Should have waited
to test the shape (which I haven't even tried to approximate yet).
Now I'll have to reshape the outer/top edges with the pieces in
place. D'oh! Next step for these walls is to...
- Add the 3/8" wide x 1/16" thick
padding pieces.
- Construct the new rear communications console.
- Add the lighting frames to the clear acrylic
pieces.
- Installed 4 out of 7 1/2 spheres for the new
hand-holds (3 on the forward 1/2 of hull and one on the
base).
- After really looking at the size (way smaller
than in my mind's eye), I've abandoned the attempt to build the
little ring around the edges of the spheres.
- Stopped at 4 of 7 as I generated so much
f**king dust on the one in the base that I decided I needed a
better location than the family room for dremeling out a
3/4" diameter hemisphere out of solid resin to fit the
3/4" OD (1/2+" ID) hemisphere.
- You'll notice the tape around one of the half
spheres - this is to protect the resin while I file the edge of
the hemisphere down to match the contour of the hull. Worked
quite well.
- The hemis on the forward hull section were much
easier as the resin is only about 1/8" thick and could be
whittled out with an Xacto.
- asdf
Stay tuned ... |
