Dry Fit Preview of the Bridge

I continued with upper structure and the interior of the bridge.At this stage I’m still a bit uncertain about how detailed I want to go with the interior.As there are a lot of windows, my first guess is that you actually can see quite a lot of it when looking through them.So I will most likely end up with a nice detailed look but I need to find out first how to achieve it.

“common basic” tools

Here’s an picture of all the tools I have used during the build of the Smit Rotterdam so far.

What it doesn't show is the airbrush/compressor, my selection of paint brushes and the electrical drill which I use as an (primitive) lathe wherever needed...

Rotating Radars

As I’m about to build the upper structure lots of decisions had to be made to make sure that all "special effects” will become as invisible as possible. So I spend quite some time to find out how to build the (rotating) radars..

As I had an cheap, small and broken "3 channel" RC helicopter lying around, I decided to re-use the tiny dc-motors. As it turned out, these could actually be build inside the tower structure.

As this seemed like the brilliant solution, it also started to give me lots of problems as most of the parts I needed additionally had to be scratch build.

Like for example the rubber belts, these where impossible to find in the diameter I needed, “Cutting” them from a larger belt was not the difficult part, but find the glue which could glue the ends together was a real challenge..

Additionally, as I only used “common basic” tools for this build so far (besides my airbrush ), I realize now how valuable it is to have the right tools..

Even dough I managed without dedicated tools, it was not that easy to get this far..

What I additionally need is a “speed control” for these radar-motors as they currently rotate too quick..