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| Bringing the Empire to the stars! |
Has it ever occurred to you how much a plastic wine glass looks like half of a steam-powered rocket ship?
Me too!
With this in mind, I recently decided to prove the resemblance...
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| Wine goblets with removable stems - this feature proved very handy in handling the model as it took shape. |
My junk projects usually evolve from useful/interesting looking bits I've spotted. Howver, in this case I actually went out looking for plastic wine glasses of the right proportions. And as luck would have it, I found them - on special! Cheap is good.
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| The goblets are glued end-to-end and strips of card are added as the first details. |
I had been wanting to make a somewhat Flash Gordon/Trigan Empire-esque rocket ship for a long time, but since this is a mostly VSF blog, I felt I should endeavour to produce something in keeping with the rest of my creations.
Hence the rivets.
And chimneys.
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| A mock-up fin is made from card to fit the curve of the rocket, before using it as a template for three plastic ones. Note the spotlight reflector used to create the thruster. |
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| The fins are stamped with holes to create a Victorian iron-work look, then lined with plastic strips to add bulk. |
This was actually a very simple build, although curves can be a bit of a challenge. All the usual O'Truth techniques came in handy - decorative hole punches, thin strips of card lined with rivets, portholes punched out of plastic - I've talked about all of these before, so I won't bore you.
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Slovenly Bob loiters by the rocket as rivets are
gradually added.
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"So why did it take you so long to finish, Colonel?" I hear you mutter. Well, stop muttering please. It's rude.
In fact, the most testing part of this build was actually the painting. And it was all my fault.
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A hatch is detailed from little scraps of
plastic.
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Beads and styrene plastic tubes form the rocket's
chimney-style exhausts.
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I made a number of mistakes which just ended up taking ages to correct:
- I undercoated in a light grey. This meant that the copper I wanted to use looked really watery and thin, even after three coats. In the end, I had to paint all of it out with brown paint and do it again. Should have known better!
- I tried doing the main green with ink. This just doesn't work for Victorian machinery, whereas paint gives a nice solid feel - and so I had to repaint the whole thing. Also should have known better!
- I kept buggering up the red and white on the Union Jack
bas-relief motif. Just because I was getting frustrated by now.
'Nuff said.
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A Union Jack is fashioned in bas-relief from
0.5mm plastic board. This is then bent into shape to fit the
curve of the rocket.
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Scraps of card and offcut plastic form interestin
extra panels to break up the smooth lines of the rocket a little.
lots of rivets are added. I also finally settled for a bead, half
a ball-point pen and a cocktail stick to create the nose-spike.
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Anyway, frustrations aside, I am very happy with the final result, and I can tick off another design idea that's been rattling around in my noggin for ages.
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UGLY ink... At this point, I was getting a little
grumpy.
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Oh, yes... I suppose I should report that the Rivet Count is 881 !
Not bad...
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The finished rocket (finally!) lands among alien
ruins somewhere in the deep reaches of the Empire.
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Lord Smudgington Smythely-Smythe leads his
intrepid shok troopers into the unknown!
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So there you go. I'll be back to work on Lord Smudgington Smythely Smythe's Hydraulically-Motorvated Sextupedal Land-Traversing Vacational Domicile soon, but in the meantime I have a rather nice card table I need to recondition (adding a chess board for good measure), a rock album to release and a few games of skittles to enjoy on the skittle board I built last week...
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"What do you mean, they've never seen the
Union Jack before?!"
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Thanks for bearing with me, folks!
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Anyone for skittles?
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All the Best!
