Monday, July 22, 2013

ATHENA - Steampunk airship (95)

As written in the last post, I'm not so sure about the final position of the two CIWS', so I decided to finally go for the 4 engines and rotors on the short stubby central wings.
A while back, I had build 1 engine that I tried to duplicate via casting.
Unfortunately I had quite some issues with it, and I finally gave up casting the 4 engines. Pondering what else to do, I remembered the CHARON's rotors and decided to give it a try.
For this I cut 8 disks out of an A4 sheet of PC and then out of these another disk.
Out of the cut disks I cut the actual rotor blades. For this I drew the lines on a sheet of paper and then it was relatively easy to draw these lines on the PC disk.
 

Next step was to cut the actual blades and round them off nicely.
 
Then they were mounted onto a central axle.
 
The rotor was then glued onto one of the outer rings.
 
 
Then some spacers (about 2cm high) glued to the lower of the two rings.
Please also note the larger spacer on the left, that already has the axle to mount the engine glued in place.
 
Then I glued the upper ring in position, and wrapped it with .5mm plastic card.
Then I had to drill a hole into the stubby wing and rudder.

Into which I can now mount the engine-rotor combo
 
The combo is rotatable, so it can be used for lift as well as propulsion.
 
 
I think it looks rather good on the ATHENA, don't you think?

Cheers
Klaus