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Space Transporter America
Some years ago I picked up the remains of a Space Transporter America, Estes #1338. Those old cold bones have been sitting around in the shop for awhile, so I thought it was time to see what could be made of them.
While I had the special plastic parts (nose and engine nozzles), the remnants didn't include the corrugated cardstock body wrappers or the decal sheet. Fortunately, the key info about those missing items is available at Scott's plan site here ; it just meant a little more scratch building work. I crafted the corrugated wrappers from Styrene sheet and strips; they were applied with sparing amounts of Contact Cement. The markings were reproduced in MicroSoft Word and in TurboCad. Searching for matching fonts took a bit of time, but eventually these were pinned down. The markings were then printed on a desktop laser printer. For the most part the painting portion of the adventure was fairly straightforward, although it took more hours than I care to recount to mask the model for the underside heatshield spray. That heatshield rolls up over the leading edges of the wings and fins, and is also on the underside of the forward canards. Ugh! The nose cone also had the heatshield extended onto its underside, and I chose to paint the blue windshield. The radome was the final touch. I have to say that I enjoyed this build, but I must also say I'm not so keen to build another, at least not from scratch. Construction was fairly straightforward, but the corrugated wraps, the masking and paint, and the scratch decals were big time consumers. Time to move onto the next project.
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John YORF #003 SAM #004 |
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