Miniproject III/20

A bicycle

I'd been pondering over the Spring, if it made any sense to buy the season ticket to the HSL city bikes this summer, as the need and especially my ability to use them were going to be many months worth of partial work commuting fewer. As a quick recap, last April-October I drove the city bikes to the nearest metro station and back, whenever there were any bikes available. Hadn't the nearest bike station to my home been always completely empty between eight in the morning and eight in the evening, I could've used those for random shopping trips and whatnot. But there rarely were bikes in any of the nearest six stations.

As a total Sunday cyclist and as someone who jumped on a bike for the first time in about fifteen years last April I didn't really need any kind of a Sci-Fi thing or any other high-end junk. I ordered a normal bike, which were nowadays called city bikes.

This sizeable box got dropped behind the door on a Wednesday afternoon and stood waiting at the entrance until Sunday mid-morning, when I finally had time to even think about the damn thing. Luckily the weather had sucked and I was, as said before, very busy with everything else, so this didn't get to bug me.

Before starting anything I leafed through the pdf manual so I'd have a clue what tools I should prepare to assemble my newest acquisition. Obviously this was no Ikea shelf, so there was no handy list of tools, but I boldly assumed that I'd need allen keys, wrenches and an assortment of screwdriver bits.

Working

Judging by the look of it and using some (hopefully) common sense it seemed that tools were not going to become an issue, which had been maybe my most noticeable worry. Assembling this was very straightforward and I could not really stretch that out to cover even a paragraph: attach the front wheel; attach the steering bar; attach the pedals and then drop in the seat; tighten up and call it a day.

A completed vehicle

This took about an hour of time. The only headscratcher was the filling of the tires, as I now learned that there were at least different valve types and this, obviously, wasn't the thing I considered normal. Luckily I had bought a multifunctional pump a few years ago that had outputs for at least two of these valve types, including this one they also used in car wheels (Schrader). Thanks to this I avoided walking my bike to the nearest fuel station to get started.

My brand new bicycle (or myself) wasn't up to the latest legistlation, as either of us needed front and rear lights if driving in anything but the bright daylight. While waiting for the Autumn I would have to invest to some sort of lights.

Finished: Project II/20

1:110 Moon rocket

Well, this was a proper building project. We decided that we'd only use our little free time in the evenings, because if the project assistants 1 and 2 were awake, the result would be pure circus. Any assembling would take place only after the girls had fallen asleep, not a moment earlier.

Boeing S-IC

The first stage ate roughly two evenings at a very calm pace of building and chatting. Actual time used was about three hours, roughly guessing. Essentially this massive construct was built in two more or less equally huge lower and upper parts that were then joined together in the end.

When the stage's core was built we got to build and attach the outer shell's panels. The incomplete build was very patchworky, thanks to especially those vertically running tubes were installed in the very end.

5x Rocketdyne F-1

The quintet of F-1 engines were massive. These too could be turned and adjusted a bit, as if you were expected to simulate the wobbling of the engine nozzles you have all seen in the Saturn V launch videos. Or maybe I was just more prone to silliness than most others. *cough*

North American Aviation S-II

Assembling the second stage started pretty much the same way as the first one. No wonder, the diameter was the same as the big sibling's. The top end was a bit more compact and quite a fun thing to build.

Lighter both in weight and greeblies the S-II was a quicker subassembly to build, because the outer shell's components were pretty much built out of four identical pieces and those were then laid in place. Plus the whole damn thing was somewhat shorter in general. This bugger got built from start to finish in one very tired evening.

In the photos above the red hook pairs were there for the attachment of the next stage. Coupling and decoupling the stages was surprisingly fun.

5x Rocketdyne J-2

At the base of the engine array, edge-wise, were the dark grey counterparts for the hooks on the top of the first stage. These were pretty handily hidden and as I said, they worked very nicely. As one would expect.

Obviously the assembled stages were to be attached together for storaging purposes. The size of this complex was getting more and more baffling, even if we already knew that the final construct was going to be 100cm tall, but still...

Douglas Aircraft Company S-IVB

This third stage of the rocket we built super quickly and while we were at it, we continued to the emergency tower and the remaining things. After the previous monstrosities these bit was like a soda can, but thanks to a rocket engine, it was automatically much cooler.

1x Rocketdyne J-2

This final stage only got one engine installed into its bottom, the same model and series as the five engines that propelled the second stage.

Lining up the chunks

Combined together all the three stages looked pretty impressive. All that was left now was the lightest subassembly, the cargo that was to be delivered into orbit.

Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age

North American Aviation C/SM

After all we'd seen the Command and Service Module was amusingly easy to build. But so it was in the real life as well, much less imposing than the whole rocket. There were enough details to recognize the piece and one couldn't expect much more greebling in this scale.

A diorama version of the command module was built where it had landed on water. The attention-grabbing orange floating ring was a fun detail.

Grumman LM

The relatively few-piece landing/ascending module pair was immediately recognizeable. Got to tip the hat to the designer(s). The Lunar Module could be packed up and hidden inside the cone of the rocket, between the payload fairings.

At this point I had not thought of connecting these two key components of a Moon landing together. Pah!

The Lunar Module was also a part of a minidiorama on a tiny piece of Moon. A reality-bending set of four astronauts was sent along, with a flag for the country of origin.

Project II/20

LEGO 21309

Lego ideas - Saturn V

We've been drooling at the Apollo program's moon rocket for a while, as the lego set was impressive. Being about a meter long we could somehow find a place for it (on its side, of course), unlike another long-drooled-at UCS-series box and especially its newest version.

On an early January day I decided to order it to make both our days happier. A couple of weeks later the couriers dragged a large box to the office and I, of course, showed it around to my colleagues, smug as a monkey. At home we recognized the construction itself as a process that was to be left for late evenings.

This was going to be fun! The thick booklet and twelve bags of pieces promised that the fun wouldn't end up during the first evening.

Finished: Project I/20

Su-27

This Flanker from a friendly eastern nation was actually a pretty nice build, though I suspect that some of this convenience was brought to the Project Mumblings by my decision not to build the landing gear. Thinking of how vague and guesswork-inducing the instructions were, especially the main landing gear might have ended looked like it was just tossed together instead of built.

At the writing of this post the plane's been enjoying flight on its stand on top of a bookshelf for a good while and I've been pretty content with the way the model ended up on my silly stand. It didn't look that bad from afar, either.