The Y-Wing "Green Leader" Project - NOW OPEN SOURCE!

[rbeach84]

Re: The Y-Wing "Green Leader" Project

Dave, make sure and apply sufficient material to 'fair' in the aft support tube; your last image looks like it would concentrate the stress in the relatively narrow cross section of the where the tube mates to the ABS 'clamp'. Even better would be for the aluminum tubing to extend back into and past that 'joint'. Same issue probably with the bottom 'socket' due to the length of the 'neck' creating a significant moment arm. What are you thinking to secure the mount in the collars?

Regards, Robert

 

[DaveG]

Re: The Y-Wing "Green Leader" Project

The block is still a WIP, but the rear mount will only be used to support the model vertically, nose straight up, for assembly and painting, never for horizontal display. Working out the moment stresses on the bottom. It may become a larger block to the extent possible by the fuselage. I'm also thinking about having the bottom block 3D printed out of a material that is carbon filled and very strong.

 

[DaveG]

Re: The Y-Wing "Green Leader" Project

Here are further refinements to the armature and fuselage. The support collars on the armature mounting block have been beefed up. The block forming the bottom mount will actually be visible as part of the fuselage. That allowed me to make it as beefy as possible. The main fuselage (blue pieces) will be 3D printed in sections that will assemble around the armature. In the renderings only the right side of the fuselage sections are shown.

Since the fuselage is going to be 3D printed anyway I considered combining the shells and mounting blocks into one set of parts but decided against it since I want to print the armature parts out of ABS or Nylon for strength and the fuselage shells out of PLA to reduce shrinkage and finishing issues.

 

[rbeach84]

Re: The Y-Wing "Green Leader" Project

Oh yeah, baby! Awesome design work, Dave. Hmm. It occurs to me that the bottom mount 'pad' thickness could be reduced flush with the 'shell' (or is that part of the 'shell' contour?), plus with a matching hole in the 'wing plate', your mount tube could engage *through* the plate. Seems to be some room under the upper body 'shell'... and a sleeve of the mount material in an over-sized plate hole might make that bit of drill work less critical... aluminum is much easier to file slightly to fit a nylon sleeve than the other way around... even a pin adapter to provide a shear force linkage from the tube to the plate. Sorry, getting some involuntary brainstorming happening. Carry on, mate.

Regards, Robert

 

[DaveG]

Re: The Y-Wing "Green Leader" Project

There is actually a block projecting out of the bottom of the main fuselage on the film models so if I made the mounting block flush I would just be adding back to it anyway. The longer the mounting block the stronger it will be. I thought about adding a hole in the Tee plate but I like the idea of it forming the 'stop' for the display roof the bottom out on.

 

[DaveG]

Re: The Y-Wing "Green Leader" Project

HAPPY LEAP YEAR! The Y-Wing Project is going OPEN SOURCE!

Very soon I will be making all of the 3D printing, laser cutting, waterjet cutting and other dimensional files for the fuselage of the Y Wing available. To anyone that wants to download them. For free! The files will be available under a Creative Commons License, which will allow others to share, use and build upon the work that I've already created. The only conditions will be that the files cannot be used for commercial purposes, that is, they cannot be used to make and sell parts, kits or finished models. I will also ask that anyone that improves upon the files repost them under the CCL for others to share and use as well.

This won't be a complete 3D printable Y-Wing but rather a (more or less) complete armature and fuselage to which detail parts can be added. So there will still be lots to do to turn it into a finished Studio Scale model.

I've been wanting to open source a Studio Scale project for a while now and figured that the time was right with the Y-Wing, even though the project is still under development. First I'll need to get a Git Hub set up for the project, then I'll start uploading files.

Stay tuned!

 

[moffeaton]

Re: The Y-Wing "Green Leader" Project

This is stellar news! I have all the donors - this will make it feel like cheating to make a super-duper styrene one!!

Have you done the Canopy, engine plant-ons, and chin guns (also used on the small Death Star turrets and Vipers) that ILM injection molded?

 

[DaveG]

Re: The Y-Wing "Green Leader" Project

I've pretty much just modeled what you've seen so far. I'm not sure what engine plant-ons you're referring to.

 

[moffeaton]

Re: The Y-Wing "Green Leader" Project

There are a few pieces cobbled into a sub assembly on the engines that were injection molded, like the canopy, some guns, Sandcrawler treads. Dave Jones had some of the Y-specific parts, along with the guns. Nothing we can't do in resin - just was wondering out loud.

This is one piece, injection plastic, that ILM made once Lorne and Jon came on board:


You've done too much already for us jerks

 

[DaveG]

Re: The Y-Wing "Green Leader" Project

I did a test print and assembly of some of the armature and fuselage shells and that led to a bunch of mostly minor tweaks to the CG model. But one big change is that the main mounting block now has a stub that goes forward into the central aluminum spar. The spar will now be sandwiched between the Tee plate one the top and the block on the bottom, making for a very strong, rigid connection. The central spar has now also been changed from a 3/4" square tube to a 3/4" x 1/2" C channel, mainly because I had some of the channel on hand and not the tube, but also because the channel is plenty rigid enough to do the job and actually a little bit easier to attach to the redesigned main block.



Here are a couple view of the 3D printed one piece main mounting block.

 

[DaveG]

Re: The Y-Wing "Green Leader" Project

The armature is assembled!

Here's the main mounting block that ties all the other parts together. There are bottom and rear sockets for a 5/8" diameter rod.



The original plan was to have the top Tee plate water jet cut from 1/4" aluminum plate. I did a test fit with a piece of laser cut 1/4" plexiglas and discovered it was more than strong and stiff enough to do the job, especially with the 1/2" aluminum tube cross spar in place.



The port and starboard nacelle cores. The Saturn V skins fit perfectly around them. There are hexagonal pockets on the inside to hold the #10 hex nuts for attaching the cores to the Tee plate.



The aluminum center spar, cut from a piece of 3/4" x 1/2" C channel and the cross spar, a piece of 1/2" diameter tubing.



The assembled armature.

 

[mvmagic]

Re: The Y-Wing "Green Leader" Project

Wow...totally blown away by this build!


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[DaveG]

Re: The Y-Wing "Green Leader" Project

REPOSITORY FOR OPEN SOURCE FILES NOW ONLINE!

The files the Y-Wing are now avaialble online here:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0BwDa06cjX-frNFY2d25BR0R5RUU

(The GitHub repository previously being used has been deleted)

Enjoy!

 

[moffeaton]

Dave, this is a monumental moment in studio scale forum history. Thank you so much for your generosity!

So glad I picked Rhino for my 3D toolbox, too!

 

[bwayne64]

Wow, just Wow ! This is my kind of project. I love using cg to design models. Sometimes, that's as far as I get , LOL. Thanks for the files, this is awesome. I hate to ask, but will you be sharing the file for the forward fuselage, please, please, pretty please, I know I'm greedy. Great project man, love it ! Cheers,

Joe

 

[DaveG]

You're welcome! I'm hoping maybe to start a bit of an Open Source movement here like you see with the R2D2 Builders Group.

So I'm still working on the forward fuselage and cockpit. I'm inclined to share it, but the 3D printing costs on those parts would be fairly high, at least to print right. Consumer FDM style printers could be used to yield a fairly good shape that could be sanded and filled but those kind of prints are a bear to score cleanly. The right way to print them would be using an SLA type process, like Shapeways' Frosted Detail plastic, but the cost would be around $300 per set and parts made of those type of UV cured resins tend to warp over time.

I am considering though possibly going ahead and having those type of high detail prints made, then molding and doing a small run of parts to sell to cover the cost. We'll see.

 

[McGraph]

We should start a sticky in the studio scale modeling where everyone can post up there blueprints the want to share and links to 3d models. Any new users would still have to dig through the threads to get a good accurate model but it would give a good base for everyone to start at. I know Maruska has some impressive blueprints and I have seen a really nice set of blueprints for the esb at-st around.

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[moffeaton]

If you want an alternative from Shapeways, my friend Jeff at PCS has some heavy duty high end 3D printers with excellent competitive rates. His parts are nicer than Shapeways.

I can PM you his email - here's the company website:

http://pcs-am.com

 

[DaveG]

Jason,

That would be great, thanks! I'm always on the lookout for new printing vendors. The ones here in Los Angeles tend to be more expensive.

 

[DaveG]

Speaking of the foreward fuselage... I tweaked things a bit, especially with the Torpedo bay on the bottom, finished up the layout of the score lines and added the little plates to the surface. Pretty happy with it at this point.