Undercarriage II

A new ascent

The previous post about the shuttle ended in a bit of a minor key, now I had found new excitement. To attempt to scratchbuild a full new set of landing gear was not the sensible option. I just could not rely on me getting anything reasonable built and especially something that was sturdy enough, consisting of polystyrene and contents of my thousand piece box.

I had heard a good bunch of times in Adam Savage's doings the idea of mixing baking soda with superglue, your superglue would set the glue even faster and strengthen the bond. This was something I really wanted to try out, because that might save my badly mangled landing gear and also potentially help carry the weight of the model.

The other day I had gone to buy a couple of lenghts of different profiles of polystyrene, third-pipe of two consecutive diameters, two cylinders of the same diameteres and a bracket-shaped beam in case I needed to support something. The last time I thought I'd maybe add a piston-like construct for support or something like it, to both keep the structure more sturdy and also to bring some real-world-inspired styling to the operation of the landing gear setup.

Kitchen-y tools

The first step was to drop a few pinches of baking soda onto a metal lid I have been using as a palette. My vague understanding was that the cyanoacrylate-sodium bicarbonate operation could be approached a couple of different ways:

When filling gaps or holes you'd fill it with the baking soda and then apply the liquid superglue on top of that. This should result in a flat and sturdy surface.

When making a joint stronger you'd sprinkle the baking powder on top of the glued area and that'd accelerate the curing / drying and also strengthen the seal considerably. Kind of welding but with glue, it has been said. This could also be done so that the other part would get the glue applied on it, while the other got the baking powder and when those got joined, the case would be closed rapidly. Though that'd require that everything was pretested, dry-fitted and especially thought of well, properly and in time, because this method would leave little to no time for readjustments.

Against my typical cautiousness and general waryness of anything unremediable, I decided to go with the last approach. My superglue just happened to be suspiciously old...

The attachable piece I covered thoroughly with baking soda

The target area covered in superglue

Yeah, because my superglue was best before at least two days ago, as I realized immediately when poking the bottle, I decided to make sure it stuck by also sprinkling the baking powder on top of the setup afterwards. The risk of my glue being way too old and its components mostly separated and might not set at all but instead fill my landing gear bays with suspicious and disgusting goo was a noticeable one.

Because of my suboptimal materials this handy trick didn't work this evening just as nicely as the big kids told on the street, but it did work better than outdated and halfway-dried-in-its-bottle superglue has worked in the past. The left landing gear unit set into its slot in a decent time.