I finished a model, a Mechanical Mole!

And another.

Probably; but, wasn’t it funny? :smiley:

Wonderful looking project. Be sure to post photos of the other tiles.

I would go to a train show just to see your menagerie on display.

Great model dude! I want to see the rest. Also, it would be really cool to hear how each part was made (for example how did you make the auger?)

I try not to bore my audience too much. :wink:

The auger is the nose section of a Pegasus “Apollo 27” spaceship kit. The tricky part was the spiral; I’m pretty proud of my solution for doing that.

I had originally thought about trying to curve a strip of styrene into a spiral, then gluing it on, but I wanted the spiral “blade” to be at least 0.125 wide, and of course, trying to bend a 0.040 x 0.125 strip edgewise without kinking it would be practically impossible. Then I thought about cutting C-shapes out of styrene sheet, but connecting the end of one “C” to the next smoothly was going to be a problem.

So what I finally did was glue a strip of 0.040 x 0.040 spiraling around the cone, using dividers to check that my pitch was constant; the small strip was easy to bend. I then used a file to dress the top of the strip so that it was parallel to the axis of the cone, and then glued another 0.040 x 0.040 strip on top of the original one. And then another on top of that; by now the spiral “blade” was 0.120 wide. One last strip on top and the blade was 0.160 wide; I waited for the whole thing to dry thoroughly and then tidied up the sides of the blade with a bit of putty and some sanding, and voila!

Surprisingly little trouble. :smiley:

…but not the most exciting thing to read about, and practically meaningless to anyone who hasn’t messed with plastic models. :rolleyes:

Hey! It’s well past late September, where are our updates with new pictures? :wink:

They’re here! They’re here!

308 views and no replies. :confused: Hmmmmm. A bit disheartening. :dubious: