100 Days of Dev: Series 4 / 2020 (Days 61-70) MK1 & The Case for Space
10 more days to look at!
Straight into it, during this 10 days I worked on:
1) Starship MK1
Finished up this model (after many more hours of work) and sent it straight to the 3D printer. One lesson learned (or re-learned here at least) is the rule of ‘a stitch in time saves nine’.
Ive made this mistake with 3D projects for as long as I can remember but this was a doozy – basically a lot of this model was rushed together when I initially made it. I think I wanted the full print done in the days right after Elon Musk’s Starship presentation… but that never happened. And now looking back at it the model is a complete mess. I must have remodelled or repaired in some way at least 80% of it overall, which were many gruelling hours of 3D modelling that really felt like a waste. If I’d just taken a bit of extra time initially to model it properly, I would have saved myself many hours of frustrating reworking. Something Ive noticed with my newer Starship model as well, its not as bad but theres a good few pieces of that model which are pretty rubbish and I know will need reworking in the future.
Time for 3D Printing:
The upper nose cone took 15 hours to print, the lower larger section 33 hours – those stats arent with the printer running at 100% speed though since its too noisy/risky printing like that overnight. Good timing with the June long weekend so I could be home to monitor for most of the time it was printing – but thats certainly the longest 3D print Ive done to date!
The completed model stacked together nicely. It still needs post-processing and a bit of cleaning up, then on to painting. Unfortunetly there also seems to have been a layer shift (you can see right where the wing sections join onto the body, which will need some fixing. But otherwise this should be looking good once painted and a nice stainless-steel chrome.
2) More Mars reading & writing
This 10 days I also finished ‘Mars a Survival Guide’ by Guy Murphy, and started on ‘A Case for Space’ by Robert Zubrin – a book Ive been wanting to read for many years (or at least the previous book – ‘A Case for Mars’ which has been updated into ‘A Case for Space’)
Thats it for days 61-70. Adding 14 hours and 20 minutes of project time to the hour counter:
Total dev-hours recorded for the challenge overall: 137 hours & 50 minutes