Okay, I’m taking a machine shop class in the evenings and I get to pick my own projects occassionally. Finding plans by NASA for a scale model of the Lunar Lander, I figured that it’d be a fast and fun project. All was going well until I try to make the cabin of the lander. There’s a line missing on the plans, for one thing (managed to figure that one out on my own), and for another thing, there’s not enough information to calculate the angles for the windows. Anybody out there know the angles used on the actual lander? My instructor (who has 20 + years as a machinist) and I spent the night pouring over the plans and the bottom image on this page trying to figure out what the possible angles were, to no avail.
I know we’ve got at least one ex-NASA contractor on the boards, and tons of space nuts here, so I’m hoping that someone might know the answer.
Well, that site had some lovely images, but nothing that gave me the information I was looking for. I’ll try sending an e-mail to the guy who put up the site, but I’m not optimistic about getting a reply any time soon.
As a last resort I can ask my old man about it, since he worked on the thing, but the chances that he has that sort of documentation lying about are pretty slim.
Heck, Sofa, I’d be willing to settle for a “Well, I think it’s a 32 degree angle, no, wait, it must have been a 34, as we knew Nixon was going to get into office, and if he found out that it was a 32 degree angle, then he would have shut us down because he would have thought that it was all some kind of Masonic conspiracy, no wait, it must have been a 35, because your mother was 35 at that time and I remember reminding myself of that fact at the time.” As of right now, I’ve got a whole lot of nothing, and without knowing that angle, it’s impossible to set the part up to cut it right. We’ve tried eyeballing it, but that hasn’t worked. IAC, thank your dad for me, the folks who worked on the Apollo program have always been my heroes.