Here's one for you: Verne and verity.

I finally appeared to have a little time on my hands the last few days to start something new - and small.
A long time ago already I made a marine diorama depicting Liberty Bell 7 attempted to be picked up by a Sikorsky UH 34 Sea Horse, call sign Hunt Club. By that time I already had this one I am doing now in mind. So you guessed it, It’s a sea diorama with a space theme (what else?). More specified: it will be a capsule pick up. But this time not just one but two. One hundred years apart.

The spacecraft pick up from Jules Verne's book

Sometimes fiction - or fantasy is not that far besides the truth. It just take a little time for it to get real. Take for instance one story of a certain Mr. Jules Verne from around 1869. His two-part novel on how people took a trip to the moon and back got reality in exactly 100 years. Not only that, but he also had a good guess at where the launch site would have been. In Verne's book it's Tampa, FLA, the real location, Cape Canaveral just under a two hour drive away from there. Okay, Tampa is at the other side of the peninsula but we'll forgive him for that. Just like the massive gun he thought up to shoot the three men to the Moon. Enough banter.
It's time for a little build again.

 Here’s part one of the building of what I think will call “Verne and verity”. It all will be around 1/200 in scale. The set will consist of two little frames side by side, one showing the pickup of Apollo 11 in 1969, the other showing the same situation one hundred years earlier, in 1869 where men in a row boat approach the returned projectile.

Frogmen jump out of the helicopter to help the Apollo 11 crew.

 

 

The parts I will use are Gary Pilsworth’s Sikorsky SH-3 Sea King (already with all the right markings on, which is nice) and a heavily reduced and modified Apollo CM by Carl Hewlett, a.k.a Surfduke. The row boat and Jules Verne’s projectile will be my own make.



First the helicopter. The Sikorsky is a joy to build. Even in this scale it fits well and the parts are nice and crisp.

 Some pieces are a little hard because of the bends or curves involved. I also didn’t use the glue tabs Gary provided the model with but did a lot of edge gluing and I used gluing strips on the inside. I work with thick card (200 gram) and that leaves big seams and ridges in this scale when you use glue tabs. So for the bigger parts I’d rather use inner strips. 

The winch was made from pieces of sewing pins and rolled up black paper. And yes, the main rotor will be movable. Here's some photo evidence. it's all shot with my phone's camera but it still looks pretty decent.

More next time!