M&S Hobbies Toyota Eagle MkIII, 1/24

[mulsannemike]

I'm the worst when it comes to completing projects. The hope here is that my fellow community will encourage me to see something through!

I give the M&S Toyota Eagle kit high marks overall for level of detail and accuracy balanced against cost. My initial impressions are here:

http://www.mulsannescorner.com/mands...aglemkIII.html

Having said that, I really wanted to correct it's short comings. But I also didn't want to get into that cycle of attempting to scratch build something that was pretty ambitious and then simply end up setting the project aside when the going got tough. At the same time I was learning SolidWorks at work. It took me a while to get some confidence, and when I did I thought this M&S project might make a good project beyond the SW tutorials. There's one key thing here, I have access to a FDM rapid prototype machine at work. And while not the best rapid prototype process given the scale I'm working in, it was certainly better than nothing especially if you take into accounts the machine's short comings (low "resolution", minimum realistic section about .5mm).

The project actually got it's start with a bit of scratch building. Initially I simply started looking at giving the front radiator inlets some depth. The standard kit looks like this:



After some resin dust and card stock and this is what I had:


Which looked like this:


Meh, not too hot. So after what seemed like days of work on SW:


And then this:


OK, so that was a start. But one of my biggest gripes was that the front underfloor on the M&S kit wasn't flat. Don't get me wrong, I understand why they did it that way. For starters, what did it look like? But some background, the MkIII took the old Porsche 962 "bubble" and went to the next level by evacuating the airflow out the side of the chassis (with the help of the pumping action generated by the spinning front wheels) helping to further reduce pressure and create front end downforce. Every car on today's LMP grid utilizes a similar technique but to an even more extreme extent, such is the passage of time and the development.

Fortunately my good friend Ryan Hicks, over at prototyp.org, had crawled all over a Eagle MkIII, and had done extensive documentation of the front underfloor. He also had produced 2D drawings. Using those as a basis, I shot the car's current owner, Tom Malloy, an email and he verified a few critical dimensions. This led to a lot of CAD work (again, I'm a novice and pretty slow), but the end result was this:


In the mean time I did new rad ducts too that were more accurate given I was going to do away with the entire front portion of the M&S kit:


Therefore I then was faced with the task of lopping the front of the M&S kit off....scary time! Right's going to replace most of left...


In the mean time I was working on another modification. It never ceases...this one had to do with the rear diffuser leading edge shape. Yeah, I'm an anorak. On the M&S kit they've depicted diffuser tunnels of parallel section. This wasn't the case for the MkIII, it had what was called a bell mouth leading edge. It should have looked something like this:




With some more SW work:


As the tunnel upsweep started rather far forward, I had to do some work on the underside of the tubsection and angled it to accept the tunnels:






Here's the front diffuser mounted to the chassis:


And here's how it all looks, albeit with some unfinished filler work:









So here's to completing this in the "near" future...thanks for looking.

[mike@af]

Wow, now this is a cool project. I love the RP work. I'm currently designing some RP stuff in SW as I post this. I look forward to watching this progress.

Did you design the front intakes and splitter using solid bodies or surfaces?

[mulsannemike]

Originally Posted by GTmike400

Wow, now this is a cool project. I love the RP work. I'm currently designing some RP stuff in SW as I post this. I look forward to watching this progress.

Did you design the front intakes and splitter using solid bodies or surfaces?

All solids. I've inquired about the old solids vs surfaces argument and only gotten the reply, "it depends." For what I'm up to here, solids work out best. As I understand it, with surfaces "infinitely" thin, they'd need beefing up before I could export them to .stl. It's just easier to work in solids as I need to be aware of scale thicknesses as well as modeling thickness (areas where it doesn't matter and I can go thicker).

[mike@af]

Originally Posted by mulsannemike

All solids. I've inquired about the old solids vs surfaces argument and only gotten the reply, "it depends." For what I'm up to here, solids work out best. As I understand it, with surfaces "infinitely" thin, they'd need beefing up before I could export them to .stl. It's just easier to work in solids as I need to be aware of scale thicknesses as well as modeling thickness (areas where it doesn't matter and I can go thicker).

Good to know. I use quite a bit of solid bodies and I am beginning to explore surfaces. There is a thicken feature for surfaces to turn them into solid bodies which would be great for RP interesting shaped parts.

[jaykay640]

Sweet! I'm lovin' it already :-)
It's a pity the RP machine is a bit rough for the job at hand but it seems your getting there nicely. I have some projects in my mind that work along those lines too. "Just" need to get into 3D-modeling first, too :-)

[MidMazar]

This is going to be inspirational and informal. Thanks for sharing.

[mulsannemike]

Originally Posted by jaykay640

Sweet! I'm lovin' it already :-)
It's a pity the RP machine is a bit rough for the job at hand but it seems your getting there nicely. I have some projects in my mind that work along those lines too. "Just" need to get into 3D-modeling first, too :-)

After seeing your work on the Jordan 191 I appreciate you looking in here at my humble thread!

[ridefast]

This certainly is going to be the most accurate Eagle MkIII model ever built.
And I'm not saying it just because of all the additional prototype work involved but because of your vast knowledge of those cars.
I think your site is one of the most informative sources for a Le Mans fan and I admire all your work there. Now I am going to enjoy it even more knowing you are a fellow modeler as well.

[mulsannemike]

Well...6 years later and LOL, still not even close to being done. I have modeling attention deficit disorder...

Anyhow, my intent was always to find someone (or even do it myself) who could create silicone mold and resin parts from my masters in order to offer it up for sale. Well, given the accessibility of 3D printer technology, I decided instead to open a Shapeways store. Ironically, the computer I made all this one took a dump years ago, and while I had the files, I didn't have anyway to export them to printable files. Well that all changed with OnShape and just this morning I was able to import the relevant files and export them out into something Shapeways could chew on.

I doubt there is a large market for this at all, but if anyone is interested:

https://www.shapeways.com/shops/mulsannescorner