Scratchbuilt 1/20th X-15

Gallery Article by Jerome Braure on Oct 12 2003

 

This is my first scratchbuilt model. It's 80 cm (31.5 in) long and required a little less than a year to complete. The fuselage was cut out of a block of hard foam using a (self-made) thermal saw, which is just a string with electrical current running through. The foam can be easily sanded to obtain the correct shape. Once it was done, the fuselage was coated with two layers of fiberglass to make it rigid. After that, some wet sanding made the surface real smooth (like a surfboard actually).

 

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The wings are made of copper-coated fiberglass plates, the kind that is used for integrated circuits. The wheels, and all other circular pieces were lathe turned aluminum. All large markings were air-brushed, the medium ones are 'letrasets' and the tiny ones (those under the cockpit) were simply hand-written with a pen dipped in paint. All the rivets were also done that way.

This is not an extremely accurate model, I made it essentially to test this new technique, which seems to work pretty well. I also did not find good plans and didn't want to spend years on the same model, so I skipped some details, but I'm pretty happy about the result.

The complete set of full-size pictures can be seen here, hope you like them.

Happy modeling.

Jerome Braure

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Photos and text © by Jerome Braure