Project completion: 1:3.7 scale pair of wartime FN5 gun-turrets for RC Wimpy

[mthuff]

I've just completed  5 year project using F360 (wonderful software btw!) and thought some might be interested in seeing them. The turrets are designed to be filming flight from within, to give a gunners-eye perspective. They're largely built from 3d printed nylon, and are entirely screwed together with M1 machine-screws, there's virtually no glue anywhere. This allowed me to back out of assembly if I needed to change the sequence, without damaging the mode.

They feature working miniature collimating gunsights, pneumatic elevation of the guns, provision for servo traverse, historically correct mechanical linkage to the sightbar to keep the gunsight parallel to the guns, and a great deal more besides.

Pictures attached and search you-tube for "Fidd88" for latest film and those made documenting the build.

[seth.madore]

Good job, it looks great!

What did you use for a slicer and printer, if I may ask? 

[mthuff]

The printing was done commercially by 3dprintuk, and I used Fusion360 to make .stl's of the nests of parts. The nests were manually built.

[gtprototype]

Fabulous results, incredible detail!  The camera views are realistic, I'll bet it's doing to be impossible or nearly impossible to tell the difference between the model and real life when you get the video cameras installed.  Thank you for sharing your work.  Certainly, a job well done!

[mthuff]

Thanks very much indeed, that means a lot in here, amongst so many other proper designers. (I'm just a self-taught amateur on F360) and had an O level pass in technical drawing back in '82! I won't pretend their weren't a few sub-optimal occurences during the project, but I shall draw a veil over those! Not bad for an old sod in a shed who hasn't made a model in 40 years?! The next phase is to build the model Wellington using extruded alloy channel. F360 has been helping a lot in generating the curvatures for patterns, against which the alloy will be curved to the required shapes. If you're not familiar with the Wellington, that may not mean much to you, but it was a fascinating piece of engineering, sadly stopped cold by the jet-age.

Probably the hardest bit of the whole project was making the compound-curved front windows.

If you want to learn more, just google "wellington" and "geodetics".

[mthuff]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3bkapxHp5M for the latest film, which documents the finished turrets. On my channel there's films of "Stills" which feature more of the CAD drawings involved too. Other films worth a shufti are "moving rams" and "new MKIII gunsight", which documents the working miniature MK III collimating gunsight with historically correct reticule. I designed that in collaboration with Tim Noack. He does amazing work on working instrument panels too, a very talented bloke.