Henschel HS-132 - Diagrams Available!

Should you wish to build my model, you can download the diagrams from www.papermodelers.com.
Enjoy!

- Eric

Henschel HS-132 - ALL DONE!

Some finishing touches...the BOMB.

 

Lots of fiddly pieces...  The the bars on the fins were a bit of a pain to assemble.

 

Bomb done! 
Now it's time to put all the parts together.

All done!

Now I'll need to write some assembly instructions.  Once done, I'll release this model, then start on my new one!

Henschel HS-132 - Part 23

Here's my update for this weekend:

The landing gears!  Lots of fiddly parts.  I had to go really slow on these.

After the glue dried, I finally got to attach them to the main body of the plane.

And finally, the HS-132 can now stand on its own three legs. :)
Good thing I haven't attached the engines yet.  I've already put in three medium sized computer screws in the nose.  But it's still turning out to be a tail sitter.  With the fuselage cavity still open, I can still attach more weight.

Henschel HS-132 - Part 22

Tails done!

 

I was a bit worried about the rudder because there was no other way to design it other than to to have the open edges facing forward.    Thankfully, they turned out pretty well. 



 

Here's a shot with the wings, elevators and rudders finally assembled.

Bottom shot showing the wheel wells.

Finally, a shot with the engine fitted.  The only things remaing are the landing gears and the SC500 bomb. 

Henschel HS-132 - Part 21

Time to put some wings on this plane!

 

I'm VERY happy with how the wings turned out.  In my previous designs, I always relied on using separate parts for making the wingtips.  This time, I carefully worked with the quirks of Metaseq to produce a 1 piece wing.  (Or rather... treat the whole wing as the wingtip..hehe)

 

I also made use of a stubby set of wing formers.





 The wings fit the fuselage really well!   

Here's a shot with the Engine and Wings dry fitted to the fuselage.  I'll resist the temptation of gluing them on until I've finished the tail part.
But that will have to wait till next weekend. :(

Henschel HS-132 - Part 20

I finally got to finish assembling the parts for the BMW003 jet engine.
Lots of small fiddly parts made this component kinda hard to make.
But with some patience, it worked out quite well.

The shot above shows the engine dry fitted to the fuselage.  Fits quite nicely!
But I won't glue it yet.    I may need to use the hole on the fuselage later on to make sure the wings are aligned. 

Henschel HS-132 - Part 19

The smokestacks from the Eric Flugzeugwerk factory begins billowing out black smokes.
Construction of the HS-132 has begun!

I start with the fuselage.

First the problems.  In the picture above, you'll see an open part in the fuselage.  I had a lot of problems when I wrapped the fuselage segment around the former before attaching it to the main fuselage.  I had to reprint the ruined parts.
I had better success by first attaching the fuselage segments to the main fuselage, and then inserting the fuselage formers after.

The front wheel well spans across one fuselage former.  It was a bit difficult to assemble that one as well.
Surprisingly, the gun ports were easy to make.

 Fuselage done!  No texture alignment problems. :)

 Next up, the BMW003 engines.

Henschel HS-132 - Part 18

Oh my...where do I begin?

If you go back to my first blog post entry for the HS132, I mentioned that this is my 2nd attempt at the model.  My first attempt was lost after an HDD crash.
Well guess what?  My stupid motherboard committed seppuku last Aug 12, 2012!
Yep.  I guess lightning does strike twice!
GOOD thing it was only my motherboard that got fried.  My HDDs were intact and I was able to recover all my files.  Unfortunately, that motherboard was an LGA775 based board.  I couldn't find any LGA775 boards anymore.  No choice but to get a new LGA1155 based board along with a new procie and set of RAM.  Oh well.
It took a lot of time to reinstall W7 as well.

Anyway, with everything back in place, I got back to finishing the texture job on the model.

Here's the final unfold:

I'm still working on the joining strips.  Once I get those done, I'll start with the test build!

For the joining strips, I got rid of the textures on a copy of the main PDO file.  I then added the pepakura glue tabs, with the edges set to 90degrees.
I'll be exporting this as PDF, which I'll then import to Inkscape for editing.
Here's the progress on the joining strips:

Henschel HS-132 - Part 17

I'm almost....almost done with the texturing.

Just a few more adjustments, then I'll be good to go for the test build!

Here are some screenshots of the textures:

Henschel HS-132 - Part 16

A little progress....

Henschel HS-132 - Part 15

It's been a while since my last update.  Lots of distractions --- work, Shogun 2: Total War, M:TG 2013, etc.  Well, mostly work.

Anyway, I'm done with the UV Mapping and have started working on the actual textures.

For the camo scheme, I decided to adopt one from a very famous JU87 based in North Africa -- the Snake Camo Stuka!

Here's what I have so far:

I hope you like it! :)

Henschel HS-132 - Part 14

It took a while, but I finally got to clean up the Metaseq model.
No more @!#$D(*$@! deleted vertices and faces message from Pepakura!

Here's how the initial unfold of "half" the model looks like:

Now it's time to freeze all the mirrored objects to produce the final wire frame.   Once done, I'll do that full unfold.

And finally, the picture above shows the model fully unfolded.
What follows next would be to start working on the fuselage and wing fillets/formers.
Then UV-mapping.

Oh yeah... this is turning out to be yet another model with a bazillion pieces! :)

Henschel HS-132 - Part 13

Now to add some final touches to the main model.

Notice anything different?

First, I added some missing pieces on the front landing gear.
Then, I decided to add gun ports. 

Also added some finishing touches to the rear landing gears.

Finally, I added that thing in the tail.  I don't know what it's called, but it's meant to protect the tail of the fuselage from being damaged during takeoff.

Now, before I start freezing of the mirrored objects, I'd better make sure I won't have any problems with Pepakura.  Time to load the model into Pepakura!

And as expected...problems...lots of them.

X deleted vertices means that Pepakura encountered vertices that meet one or more of the following criteria:

• too close to each other
• not part of a face

Y deleted faces on the other hand means that a face meets one or more of the following criteria:

• overlaps another face (e.g. two faces share two or more edges)
• the face has surface area that is too small (just a hunch...)

Z deleted objects means that Pepakura encountered an object that has no faces defined under it.

Now this is annoying.  Pepakura won't tell you WHAT FRIKKIN vertices and faces and objects were deleted!  Instead, Pepakura will give you hours of fun trying to find out what caused those problem.

The easiest problem to solve is the deleted objects.  Just make sure that you've got no "empty" objects in your model.  And yes, even if an object has a child object, but no faces defined in it, it's still considered an "empty" object.

Deleted vertices and faces are a different matter.
Metaseq can automatically fix some of those problems via the Object > Join closed vertices and the Object > Align Faces followed with the Object > Delete overlapped faces.  Unfortunately, Metaseq can only do so much.  I'll still need to manually search for those remaining problem faces and vertices.

After Pepakura loads the model, I can also find problem areas by manually inspecting each object and looking for open edges where there shouldn't by any open edges.

First the wing.  There's a red open edge on the wheel well.  That open edge shouldn't be there.
Need to fix that.. :(

Here's another one! Two open edges on the front landing gear wheel wells!

Here's another one... the bomb fins.
Oh well... cleaning this up will be a lot of work. 

Henschel HS-132 - Part 12

Last week, I stopped working after finishing the front landing gear wheel wells.
Now I'm going to start working on the rear wheel wells.

As in my last post, I start by cloning the rear landing gears, and "raising" the cloned landing gear by rotating along the Z-Axis.  You may notice on the picture above that the gear shaft kinda bulges out of the wings.  This was intentional.  I had to make the landing gear shaft a bit "fat" since I'll be printing this on card stock.   Card stock is difficult to roll very thin.  As a compromise, I made the shafts "fat" to allow for easier rolling.

Now, I've created the rear wheel well template what I'll use to carve out the actual wheel wells.

Here's what I ended up with after subtracting the rear wheel well template from the wing. 
Now it's time to make the wheel covers.  I'll do this by getting the intersection between the wheel well template and the wing.

And here we are... what a mess!  I sure wish that some day, O. Mizuno (the guy who wrote Metaseq) would create his own BOOLEAN operation plugin to replace the old one.  

Now for the clean up process.  Since I only need to make the wheel covers, I start by removing the unneeded edges and vertices.

To help with the cleanup, I'll un-hide the wing.  Then I'll change the edge colors so that I'll "see" which edge belongs to what object.

To clean up the wheel covers, I'll remove the vertices that have no "partner" vertex with the wing.  This is where having a different edge and vertex coloring helps.  (See picture above.)

And finally, rear wheel wells and covers done!

Henschel HS-132 - Part 11

Time to work on the wheel wells!
Before I get started, lemme tell you that I think the wheel wells are the most P.I.T.A. part of the model, both to design and to assemble, at least in my opinion.  Not only do they get in the way of fuselage formers/fillets, they also sometimes span two separate objects (e.g. fuselage and wing), AS WELL AS formers/fillets.
But somehow, I don't feel I've designed a complete model if I don't put those wheel wells in.  So I just treat it as a necessary evil.

So here we go.

Let's start with the front landing gear wheel wells.  In the picture above, you'll see that I've created the front landing gear.  I've intentionally lengthened the gear shaft because I'll be "snipping" off part of it later when the wheel well is done.

I then simulated "raising" the landing gear up so that I would more or less get an idea how big a wheel well I need to carve out.  So as not to mess up the position of the original landing gear, I cloned it.  I then did a local rotate on the cloned landing gear and placed it on it's "raised" position.

Next, I created a "shape" that I'll use to carve out the wheel well.

Here's how the front wheel well template looks like.  To carve out the wheel well, I'll need to subtract this template from the FUSELAGE using the BOOLEAN operation.

And here's how it looks like (after cleaning up the residual mess that BOOLEAN left behind, of course :-P ).

Making the landing gear covers involves a little bit more work.  I'll need to get the surface of the FUSELAGE where it intersect with the wheel well template.  The easiest way I've found is by using the BOOLEAN INTERSECT function.  The image above shows the result of the operation.

But I want just the covers, so I deleted the other parts of the object.  I then split the two faces above into two separate objects.

Using the local function, I relocated local coordinate center axis, then I did a local rotate along the local X-Axis.

Finally, I did the same for the rear part of the wheel covers.  For this one, I rotated along the local Z-Axis.

And here's how it looks when completed.

The process for the rear wheel wells is basically the same.  But I'll do that one in a later update.

That's it for now.