Scratchbuilding an Eclipse-class SSD

Always Learning · Post by **Always Learning** » Thu Apr 21, 2011 8:16 am

So here we go...

I love the Eclipse from Dark Empire and want to build one. I have the fantastic Scale Solutions kit, but there's one problem - it's not big enough! The Eclipse is 17.5kms long and I want a ship that has more mass to it to help convey that. I'm not so worried about an exact scale as I am overall size. I thought about carving it out of foam and gluing plastic sheet to it, but I feel lost, and am reaching out to 'Those with More Knowledge of Said Matter' for some help. I am going to do this come hell or high water, but I want it to look good and there are some amazing scratchbuilds on this site. Let the tutorials begin! please...

Joseph C. Brown · Post by **Joseph C. Brown** » Thu Apr 21, 2011 8:42 am

If you have already read the various tutorials on building with foam, then all I can add is 'get going' and just start.

The biggest benefit to using foam is that it is inexpensive (cheap!) and that translates into plenty of practice material.

I'm currently working on a catamaran carrier project that is a recreation of an obscure model from the late 1960's. The original kit was effectively a bath tub toy, perhaps 6 inches long. To convey the impact that the box cover art had on my imagination, I wanted it to be BIG - in the 22-inch range.
http://www.picturetrail.com/sfx/album/view/23709456

Because I am using foam, and working from box-art, I've had to guess at alot of the angles and proportions. Foam allows for that, because if I mess up (and I have!) it's easy to recover from, and try another tact.

I'm pretty happy with the results so far, and I have been gluing sheet styrene to the foam with 3M Super 77 from a can.

http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/e ... 7/Super77/

It will *eat* the foam if you over-apply it, regardless of what RC modelers and 3M say about it. But if you spray it on the styrene, wait a few seconds, about 30 or so, and then apply the sprayed styrene to the foam, it works great!

Yes, various pva-based glues like Elmer's also do a good job. But I'm part of the instant gratification generation, and I want to get the model done, not wait forever for a glue to set.

So, my main advice is just do it - if you wait for perfect advice the model will never get built.

Also, go through the Rocket Team Vatsaas website; they have done frickken AWESOME work with foam!

http://www.vatsaas.org/rtv/

Their advice on making your own cheap hot-wire cutter is worth seeing all by itself.

.

ajmadison · Post by **ajmadison** » Fri Apr 22, 2011 1:07 pm

Here is one rule of thumb, anything over 24" or 60cm quickly becomes unwieldy in several different ways. First off, flipping it over to work on the top vs. the bottom becomes a non-trivial effort. Not necessarily heroic, but its not like flipping a 1/72 P-51 over to install the landing gear. So simple things take more time. Something else to keep in mind, is that the surface area multiples as a cube (as in X to the 3rd power or X^3) of the major dimension. Again, this is a rule of thumb, but what I'm trying to convey is that a 12" model has 1/64th the surface area of a 24" model.

If I may make a suggestion, go get some poster board or some foam core board, which ever you're comfortable working with. Make a rough prototype of your intended project. Start detailing it, even if its just little paper cut outs. My definition of failure for a project is that I get overwhelmed by some problem I encounter during the effort and I put it away for more than a month. I've had several builds 'fail' in this way. There are two major ways this happen. In one case, I could build the major components very quickly but got to the detailing stage, and the available references were inadequate to allow me to figure out the intricate relationships between detail parts it was a 3 dimensional jig saw puzzle and I only had photographs of it. A certain iconic Star Wars ship was a classic example of this problem. In another example, I got to the detailing stage, and was completely stymied by making, get this, port holes. The scale of this ship called for elongated ovals. I could not make them consistently the same size & shape, nor could I align them correctly. Took me years to figure out how to make a custom punch & die to cut these port holes. If money had been no object, I would have just ponied up $5000 and bought a laser CNC machine. Albeit, today, I probably could contract someone to make the detail pieces for me.

Hope this helps.

MillenniumFalsehood · Post by **MillenniumFalsehood** » Thu May 12, 2011 9:33 pm

Rather than building it out of foam and styrene, I'd make it out of acryllic sheet. It's cheap, sturdy, and rigid, and you can drill holes in it and screw it to a wooden frame. In the wooden formers you can install pipe in order to mount it to a metal frame to hold it up while you spin it around and add detail.

This is the same way they made the eight foot Imperial Star Destroyer for The Empire Strikes Back, and if it's good enough for ILM . . .

You'll want to use Ambroid or Plastruct's plastic welder to glue styrene chips to the hull, because they will weld styrene to acryllic.