So last time I left you with a cliff-hanger. Sorry about that—the opportunity so rarely presents itself on this blog.

You may recall that things were coming along well with my re-do of the paintwork on this kit, and I’d got to the point of masking off some of the RCS thrusters on the Command Module, so that I could reproduce the red-brown areas around them, visible in this reference photograph:

To that end, I’d used a set of round and elliptical hole punches to make appropriately sized holes in a sheet of Bare-Metal Foil I was using for masking:

Bare-Metal Foil is good stuff for this job, and I decided to use it because it’s a little less sticky than Tamiya tape. Which was a mistake, because it turns out that the hole punch slightly stretched the foil, so that it didn’t smooth down perfectly around the area to be painted. Which led to a collection of monstrous and irreparable paint leaks on to my lovely chrome finish.

So I popped off all my 3D-printed detailing, and stripped the damn thing down again. The difference this time was that, after stripping it down to its bare resin last time, I’d built an extension to the aft bulkhead using styrene. And the Xtreme Metal thinner I used to remove the paint also partially melted the styrene, which then required some filling and sanding and was never quite the same again.

I’ll spare you the next cycle of painting, which went fine. I’d had the presence of mind to test the previous chrome surface with hole-punched Tamiya tape before I stripped it down, and knew that I could produce good masking for my thruster nozzles without damaging the metal finish.

I’d also established that, while resistant to buffing and masking, the Xtreme Metal Chrome was sensitive to being handled with bare fingers. So I was wearing cotton gloves to handle the model while applying the paint. And it all went swimmingly. Here are the thrusters, all painted up, with the chrome still gleaming:

What could go wrong now? Dear Reader, taking a firm grip on a shiny cylindrical object while wearing cotton gloves is not without risk. And so I missed my grip and fired the thing, like a lemon pip, across the room in a flat arc that connected with a concrete floor. Pretty much everything was irreparably damaged, except the New Ware photoetch hatch, optics penetration and umbilical connection, and the little Aerospace Place umbilical fairing. (The New Ware scimitar antennae for the Service Module both catapulted off somewhere—I’ve never seen them again. But my High Gain Antenna array was still safely sitting in a pot on the window-ledge, not yet attached.)

So that was … discouraging.

Someone less stupidly persistent than I would probably have given up at this point. But I’d recently had blog-related contact from someone who was also building the RealSpace CSM, who revealed that the current version of the kit is a big improvement on the original I’d been wrangling. So I ordered one:

And indeed it was an improvement:

There’s a nice 3D-printed SPS nozzle, which is much better proportioned than the old resin version, and is separate from the aft heatshield, making painting easier. There’s a set of nice RCS thrusters for the Service Module, and a well-proportioned umbilical fairing, albeit without surface detail. No High Gain Antenna, though.

The CM and SM are separate, but not in a particularly useful way—no attempt to model the CM heatshield or the SM interior.

And the surface finish of the SM is horrible, full of ridges and furrows and lacking even the few panel lines of the old kit. The CM likewise has a rather rough surface, and still has its inadequate docking probe. But it seemed like the only additional part I was going to have to reorder was the Aerospace Place’s docking probe, which had smashed as part of the general carnage.

The aft heatshield was better proportioned and detailed except at the fill and drain ports, for which I had to manufacture a little raised rim from styrene strip, and paint on the circular ports themselves.

After a considerable amount of filling and sanding, I scribed a few panel lines on to the service module. Here’s the result, with the aft heatshield in place and a coat of Tamiya primer:

You can see that there’s a neat rectangular recess for the umbilical connector (the one that connected the Service Module to the Launch Umbilical Tower), and my little photoetch New Ware detail dropped neatly inside that with only a minimal amount of trimming, so that’s a nice feature.

And on the other side there’s a recess representing the umbilical connection between the SM and CM—and it’s in the right place, glory be.

So the SM got a coat of paint. (Are you counting? That’s the fourth time I’ve masked off the radiator panels.)

The scimitar antennae are punched out of styrene sheet, and are better proportioned than the photoetch New Ware parts I lost in the previous catastrophe.

The CM got its coat of Black Base, and was left to cure for a week.

Here it is, chromed up and detailed, with its new Aerospace Place docking probe.

(The cocktail sticks are temporarily glued to the back surface, so that I didn’t need to handle it while painting.)

The Service Module got its RCS quads attached, and its decals applied while I waited for my replacement decal sheet to arrive, having lost all the CM decals during an earlier round of destruction.

The CM went on without mishap, the decals arrived and were applied, and the High Gain Antenna was finally attached. There was a final debate over whether to use the umbilical fairing from The Aerospace Place (left) or the one that came with the kit (right, with a tiny bit of surface detail added in the form of styrene strip):

The RealSpace part had the better proportions, and (after sanding off the surface irregularity visible above) I opted to use that.

And, at long bleedin’ last, it was finished. Here’s the final result:

Bearing in mind that the thing is just 4cm across, it turned out OK in the end, I think.

Finally, a comparison of the old and new versions of the kit, using the original I built back in 2016 (on the left):

Here’s a reference image:

You can see how misproportioned the original was—short and fat, missing the region behind the aft radiators, the SPS bell too thick at its base, the aft heatshield too thick, the umbilical fairing the wrong shape. The RCS quads from the Revell kit were all wrong, and the HGA array ridiculously small. The new kit is, if anything, a little too slim. It could do with adding a 3D printed docking probe and HGA, and improving the surface of the Service Module. But it’s definitely an improvement. Unfortunately, when mounted on the Revell Saturn V, it’s a poor fit—the old version fitted snugly; the new one leaves a rim about a half-millimetre wide all round.

Now I’m off for a lie down in a darkened room.

Last time, I was contemplating how to add feedhorns to my High Gain Antennae from The Aerospace Place. The solution I eventually came up with was to use some 0.25mm fibreoptic strands, and to melt the ends into a blob by holding them close to a hot soldering iron. Sprayed white, these gave me something like the appearance I wanted.

Meanwhile, I’d begun to suspect that my Aerospace Place HGA was mounted on too long a supporting rod. To check, I scanned the relevant section of David Weeks’s drawings, halved the scale, and printed it out. Sure enough, the rod was too long, by about 5mm:

If you peer, you’ll also be able to discern my little feedhorns. Which are, if you compare them to the drawings. Mounted on the wrong dish ribs. Sigh. I’ll pop them off, repair the damage with new white decal strips, and then attach them where they should have been in the first place. And I’ll snip a bit of length off the HGA arm.

Then my revised umbilical fairing from The Aerospace Place arrived, and it was the right size:

There’s a roughened area on the “underside” of the CSM, evidently intended as a marker for where the fairing should sit. You can see it here, on a photograph taken a little earlier in the build:

The Z-plane of the CSM runs more or less through the vertical row of embossed circular features on the Command Module, to the right of the RCS thrusters, and the umbilical fairing is offset a couple of degrees from that line, so that all looks fine. If you’re not paying attention.

I actually had the fairing glued in place before I realized that it was offset in the wrong direction.

Aaargh. The fairing should actually be offset clockwise (as you look from the nose). It should be sitting more or less hard against the little radiator panel to the left.

Popping it off to resite it of course damaged my fragile Xtreme Metal paint, and I needed to do a bit of sanding to abolish the misleading rough area:

So now there’s a problem. You’ll see I’ve already applied some decals to the Command Module—a set of labels from Space Model Systems. I didn’t want to disrupt those, so I was faced with trying to mask off and patch the delicate chrome finish.

It went OK, I felt, though not perfectly, and I got the umbilical fairing in the right place:

Here’s a photo of the real thing, for comparison:

So a sensible person would have accepted this as a half-way decent save, and moved on. Instead, I decided I’d try to rectify a little flaw on the surface of the CM—a blob of glue that had extruded from the edge of the photoetch optics penetration. So I sanded the area down and set about doing another patching job. But this time, my masking didn’t work—it peeled off the chrome paint underneath it when removed. Another attempt to patch the problem, and I had more paint peeled off.

So I admitted defeat. And this is what defeat looks like:

I popped off all the 3D printed detail, and stripped the thing back to the bare resin using Xtreme Metal thinners, sacrificing my decals (and ordering a replacement set).

At which point I decided I might as well do the little job that I’d previously shirked—building up the region behind the rear radiators, which I did with some styrene strip and thin styrene sheet.

Then I went through the whole build again. The rear extension turned out fairly well:

This time I let my Xtreme Metal Black Base coat sit for three or four days before applying the Chrome, and suddenly it was adherent enough to be polished as advertised! Which meant I wasn’t going to need to apply a sealant coat, and could preserve my nice specular finish:

Which also meant that I could do some decent masking without damaging the paintwork, this time, so that I could paint on the red-brown finish around the CM thrusters. This would be more satisfactory than my own printed decals, which (you may recall) turned out to be a deep translucent red once in contact with the reflective surface of the Command Module.

So I used a set of appropriately sized hole punches—a 2mm round punch, and a 2x3mm oval punch, to make holes in my masking material. Still leery of using Tamiya tape, I opted for Bare-Metal Foil again, this time using gold to contrast with the chrome paint. Here’s the first set of roll thrusters masked off:

And it was at this point that things really hit the fan. More next time.

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Last time, I was about to embark on applying the bright chrome finish to the Command Module. This went on over a coat of Xtreme Metal’s Black Base, and turned out looking pretty good. Deceptively so, as it turned out.

There were some nice specular metallic reflections:

I set it aside to cure for a week or so, before deciding whether I needed to seal it with a transparent overcoat, and turned my attention to some of the 3D printed parts:

The Aerospace Place’s umbilical fairing was finished in Xtreme Metal Aluminium, which showed up a curiously corrugated surface on its exterior curve. I presume this is an artefact of the 3D printing process, since this surface appears to have been smoothly finished in photographs of the real thing:

So I sanded it lightly and repainted. The Reaction Control System quads for the Service Module, also from The Aerospace Place, are a much better match for the real thing than the Revell kit parts. They got a coat of Xtreme Metal Aluminium, and then I brush-painted the nozzles with a mixture of Tamiya Flat Aluminium and Bronze to produce the appearance in the photograph above. This was a poor match for the odd sheen of the real thing, so I ended up redoing the paint job with an admixture of Tamiya Gold Leaf.

As the tilt of the parts in the photograph suggests, they come with locating pins, so I drilled out corresponding holes in the Service Module resin, making them easier to locate precisely.

I forgot to photograph The Aerospace Place’s neat little docking probe. There’s a right way up and a wrong way up to fit this to the model, since it consists of a triangular array of fairly chunky pitch arms, interleaved with another triangular array of slimmer support beams. A look at reference photographs, like the one below, shows that if we look at the CSM from the front, with the CM hatch “up”, the docking probe is orientated so that the thicker pitch arms form an upright “Y”, while the interleaved support beams are in an inverted “Y”.

Going back to the CSM part, I discovered that the chrome finish rubbed through to the black base coat on only minimal handling. (I gently rubbed the area that would be concealed by the docking probe with a cotton bud.) This was a disappointment, because the manufacturer, and various end users, are vocal about how robust Xtreme Metal finishes are—buffing them up to a high shine almost as soon as they’ve dried.

So I needed to apply some sealant:

This comes from AK Interactive, who make the Xtreme Metal range. A bottle of unpromising looking stuff with a very strange name, so I tested it on some painted scrap styrene, and it seemed to work fine. When I applied it to the chrome finish on my model, it very definitely subdued the metallic specular reflections, replacing them with a more diffuse glossy finish. But it did produce a much more robust surface, so … swings and roundabouts:

Notice that the docking probe and RCS quads are now in place, and I’ve applied black paint to the windows (gloss) and anti-dazzle panels (matt).

Then there was a hitch. I hadn’t trial-fitted my Aerospace Place umbilical fairing, and when I did it seemed far too large. I checked its dimensions by scanning David Weeks’s excellent 1/48 drawing of the CSM, and printing it at 1/96 scale:

For comparison, here’s the rather battered resin version that comes with the RealSpace kit, and an unused New Ware replacement part from my Saturn V build that I belatedly remembered and dug out of the attic:

So I contacted The Aerospace Place via the Shapeways website, and got a prompt reply acknowledging that the part was oversized, and promising to send my a correctly sized replacement.

While waiting for that, I addressed the problem of the little patches of paint around the Reaction Control System nozzles of the Command Module. You can see them here:

Red-brown circles around the yaw and pitch thrusters, and paired ellipses around the roll thrusters. So I printed up some red-brown decals of the appropriate size:

This wasn’t a great result—even very dark brown decals developed a red tint when applied to the metallic surface of the CSM, but it was certainly a better result than the bright red paintwork on my previous build of this kit.

And I did some work on The Aerospace Place’s High Gain Antenna array. The usual guidance is that the four mesh dishes should be painted black, including their support struts. And that’s certainly what the dishes looked like when they were photographed in shadow. But photographs of a real item held at the Stafford Air & Space Museum show dark mesh and pale struts.

Maybe the dishes that flew on real Apollo missions were painted differently? I think not. Here are some reference images of the Apollo 11 HGA, directly illuminated (left) and shadowed (right):

So I elected to paint my HGA array in black and white:

The crisp finish to the radial struts comes from Xtradecal fine white lines (I think about 0.25mm), rather than my steady hand.

What the antenna dishes need now is some feedhorns (the prominent objects poking out of the middle of the dishes in my reference photos above), though it’s a bit of a puzzle how I’m going to make them. More on that next time.

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Those of you who’ve been following my build logs for a very long time will recall that I’ve built this model before, back in 2016, when I started assembling the Revell 1/96 Saturn V—which I completed three years later, putting the finishing touches to the last component just a few days before the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing. The RealSpace resin replacement was necessary because the Revell kit provides a Block I Command/Service Module, whereas the manned Apollo missions all used Block II CSMs.

Here’s how my previous RealSpace CSM turned out:

There were things I didn’t like about it at the time, and I’ve become progressively more unhappy with it as time has gone by. The RealSpace kit doesn’t provide parts for the Reaction Control System thruster quads, or for the High Gain Antenna at the rear of the Service Module, which means using the parts provided for the inaccurate Revell CSM. The Revell RCS thrusters weren’t quite the right shape, and the HGA was grotesquely undersized. I used Bare-Metal Foil to produce the bright finish on the Command Module, but had to punch holes in it for the CM’s RCS, and at this scale it was difficult to do that accurately. And the kit’s docking probe was damaged when it arrived, so needed some repair work. And since completing the build I’ve convinced myself that the red CM thruster surrounds are too bright, and that the areas around the CM hatch and optics array are incorrectly raised.

So almost immediately after I finished the first build, I ordered another RealSpace CSM, which has languished in my stash ever since, primarily for lack of a good solution to the underscale High Gain Antenna. But I was inspired to dig it out and start work when I discovered that Shapeways offered an array of 3D-printed Apollo replacement parts at 1/96 scale, provided by The Aerospace Place—including an appropriately sized HGA, and a very nice docking probe which disposes of the need to do delicate surgery on RealSpace’s resin probe, which is both extremely fragile and filled with flash that needs to be trimmed away.

I understand that newer versions of this RealSpace kit are somewhat different, but here are the three parts I’ve got:

The CSM is a single unit, the aft heatshield and the engine bell of the Service Propulsion System are another, and there’s a rather chewed-looking umbilical tunnel as a small separate part. You can see the raised Command Module hatch, above—this should be flush-fitting, so I needed to do a bit of sanding, while trying hard not to damage any of the moulded EVA handles in the hatch area.

As with my previous kit, the docking probe is damaged:

But this won’t be an issue this time because I have a replacement part—so I’ll just sand off the kit probe.

The scimitar antennae on the Service module are likewise fragile and damaged:

That little rectangular stub (next to the “75” on the cutting mat) should be a half-circular protrusion. This would be fairly easily fixed with a bit of sheet styrene, but instead I used some photoetch parts from the New Ware Saturn V detail set.

I used one of these sets for my Saturn V, and was very pleased with it, but I didn’t propose buying another set just for the CSM parts it contained. Fortunately, I found someone on eBay who was selling off some “partially used” photoetch frets from this set at an understandably low price. From the photographs, it was evident that someone had started building the Saturn V from the bottom up, and all the parts for the CSM were unused. So that was handy.

Then there was the problem of the rear pour surface, which needed a bit of filling and sanding.

This is a real problem with this kit—the aft bulkhead of the Service Module is formed by the pour surface of the resin. In both my kits, this surface has been incomplete, making the CSM too short overall. The situation with this one is slightly better than with my original, but there is still insufficient depth behind the rear radiator panels. I hummed and hawed a bit over whether I could build up the rear surface with styrene in some way, but eventually decided to just accept the defect, rather than ending up with an eye-catchingly ugly extension.

Here’s the CSM with New Ware photoetch parts in place. I’ve sanded down the inappropriately raised hatch and optics areas, and replaced them with New Ware parts. Also visible, if you peer, is the New Ware umbilical connector, and one of the scimitar antennae. And you’ll notice that the damaged docking probe has been removed.

I’ll add the hatch handle using a sliver of styrene in due course.

The whole thing then got a coat of Tamiya white primer, which will serve to provide the white areas of the Service Module (mainly the radiator panels). Here’s the primed part, with the white surfaces masked with Bare-Metal Foil.

This is handy stuff, because I was able to rub it down over the raised edges of the radiator panels, and then gently slice it away around the panel edges using a fresh scalpel blade and minimal pressure. (Also evident, above, is the shallow area behind the lower radiator panels, which at this scale should extend for about 2½mm, but barely manages 1mm.) I also masked off the scimitar antennae, which were also white, with a couple of slips of Bare-Metal Foil just before painting.

I’d found painting the combined engine bell and aft heatshield a little awkward, last time, so opted to replace the RealSpace part with 3D printed parts from The Aerospace Place—it was easier to mask and paint the engine bell and heatshield separately. Here’s the result:

Also visible is one of the two little panels I cut from sheet styrene, to detail the aft SM bulkhead on either side of the heatshield. I finished the heatshield using AK Interactive’s Xtreme Metal range—Chrome for the heatshield itself, and Gold for the flexible boot around the base of the SPS bell. After a day or two I decided that the chrome finish was too bright, and also discovered that some of the chrome had already rubbed down to the black base coat after minimal handling, so I brushed on a layer of Tamiya Chrome. The masked Service Module got a coat of Xtreme Metal Aluminium, which I’d previously established bonded very nicely to the Tamiya Primer. Here are the two components, finally assembled:

Getting the heatshield correctly orientated relative to the principal axes of the CSM requires care. There are two arched structures at neighbouring corners of the heatshield, which were the ports through which engine fuel and oxidizer were filled and drained. My photographs above don’t show them to their best advantage, but they’re easily identifiable if you’re handling the kit part. The correct orientation of the heatshield can be established using these ports as a reference. Here’s a diagram showing an early version of the heatshield, but with the ports in their final positions. We’re looking at the Service Module from behind:

The -Z position marks the centre-line of the Command Module hatch. Don’t use the Service Module Reaction Control System quads as landmarks for the Z and Y axes—as I detailed in my first post about The Coordinate Axes Of Apollo-Saturn, the RCS quads were offset from the principal axes by 7º15′ in a clockwise direction when viewed from ahead:

That’s it for this time. Next time, I’ll be applying a bright chrome finish to the Command Module, and (I hope) finding a way to prevent it rubbing off again.

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