Building the Thunderhawk, Part II

More rocket construction pics. Go here for the first set.


This picture follows on pretty closely from the last one in the first set. Here both wings are attached, but no cockpit, muzzle brakes, or screamers. The rocket is still laying on its side.


Here we're getting close to the end of construction. Just in front (to the right) of the fuselage transitions you can see the cockpit canopy in blue. I Dremeled it out of a breath mint container; the other half of the container is laying in front of the rocket. The red screamers (noisemakers) are glued into the dorsal and ventral pods, and I added cardstock panels to strengthen the fins.


Here's the ass end of the rocket in dorsal view. I wrapped masking tape around the gun barrels to make muzzle brakes. The detail bits at the front of the aft fuselage are made from spare model airplane parts (green), more of that breath mint container (blue), and a pen cap (black), plus a piece of small dowel rod.


Time to detail the solar panels. This is fiberglass screen, cut with scissors over a traced wing pattern with a half-centimeter inset on all sides. Good shot of the cockpit canopy here too.

At first I painted the whole rocket gray, thinking I'd go for black-on-gray coloring like a TIE Interceptor. But it looked too dull, so I repainted the whole thing red. The nose, solar panels, gun muzzle brakes, and fuselage braces are black, and you can see that the fuselage braces are still masked off. Still a fair amount of work to do. I need to paint the cockpit canopy, touch up the paint in about a dozen places, put on decals, and glosscote the whole thing. But it's coming along.

Building the Thunderhawk

Rockets have been on my mind because last week I got an announcement about a rocket launch coming up this Saturday at a park here in Berkeley.

Naturally, being the awesome but busy guy that I am, I had a few unbuilt kits in the closet collecting dust. So I pulled them out and started thinking about interesting ways to combine them. I am building a big-ass starfighter, and I'm calling it the Thunderhawk. Estes had a kit back in the day called the Thunderhawk, but I don't care. It was not worthy of the name. If you want to give something a name that is so sweet that makes you a little sick just to think about it, I think Thunderhawk is about as good as it gets. My rocket is definitely going to be worthy.

I haven't built a rocket in maybe 15 years. This is the most complicated model I've ever attempted, not least because I'm making it up as I go along, and most of the parts are made from scratch. The body tubes came from three Estes kits: a Screamin' Mimi, a Baby Bertha, and the Sith Infiltrator that I picked up on clearance for five bucks before we moved from Oklahoma. I cut down the nose cones from the Mimi and the Bertha to make the connectors. The fuselage braces, guns, and fins are almost all made from scratch using dowel rods and basswood stock, although I did chop some of the Mimi's fins into new shapes.

My three best friends in this enterprise have been my Dremel, good for cutting and power-sanding small parts; my Legos, good for building custom fin alignment rigs; and some cardstock, also good for building fin supports.

Here you can see the completed fuselage (the engine mount is sticking out at the bottom) sitting in the alignment rig for the main wings.

And here are the wings in place while the glue dries. The main wings are made from 3/16" basswood stock from the local hobby store and laminated for strength.

At the end of the main wings there will be vertical fins with smaller fins canted in at the top and bottom, sorta like a TIE Interceptor or a Gunstar. This is another Lego rig I built to hold those fins in place while they set up.

Lots going on here. The fuselage is laying on its side in the new Lego drydock. You can see that I've added additional pods on the top and bottom and small canard wings in front of the fuselage transition. The completed wing/gun combos are laying in front, waiting to be glued on.


Here's a closeup of the back end with one of the wing/gun combos in place. The white pillars are cardstock supports.

I still have a lot to do. I have to finish the other wing, cut down a breath mint container to make a cockpit canopy (no kidding), cut up some small dowels to make pipes for detailing, seal the fins, spray paint the thing, detail paint it, and put on decals, which I'll have to kitbash from something else.

Still, I'm having a hell of a lot of fun, and it should be a kickass rocket when I'm through. Stay tuned.

Incidentally, if you're still in the dark about why model rocketry is cool, go to this site and watch some the videos.

The herd

I'm a wreck. Everywhere I look, I see people who have their shit together to a higher degree than I do.

I don't have any data. No database, no big collection of specimens, no organized framework, no clear sense of where I'm going in the medium-to-long term--no program, in other words. Just a dubious stew of weird specimens, half-baked ideas, and curiosity. And, well, okay, I do have a little data. Little enough that just about everyone else has more.

A couple of clarifications here. First, I'm not complaining. My strategy of working on whatever's most interesting has gotten me this far and kept me happy in the meantime. Most of the people who do seem to have their shit together expend all that organizational energy on problems that seem deadly dull to me. I'm just worried that someday I'm going to be called to account--for example, by a job search committee--and when they ask, "Wedel, what the crap are you doing?" I won't have a satisfactory answer.

Second, I'm not kidding. I've tried to express this before, but no one believes me. Evidently I give off the air of someone who knows what he's doing. I'm just trying to give you the Wedel-internal view. Who knows, maybe everyone feels this way and I don't know that because no one ever talks about it.

Unless you're part of a search committee and you're checking up on me, in which case I am stone-cold badass researcher, and I'm just writing all this baloney to keep the proles from feeling too bad about how much their lives suck.

Anyway, that's not what I sat down to blog about. I also have a collection of toy sauropods. I'm sure it's nowhere near the world's biggest, and I'm not bragging, I'm just telling. I tend to pick up a new one whenever I take a trip somewhere. I can tell you that the NHM Cetiosaurus came from my first trip to London and the NHM Mamenchisaurus came from the second, and that the Brachiosaurus skeleton came from the gift shop at Dinosaur National Monument (the one at the Wall, not the one on the road in with the ride-able Diplodocus from the previous post). I'm not sure if it would be inspiring or pathetic if I could remember where I'd gotten every one. In any case, I can't.

There's only one that is really worth blogging about at all, and that's the plush Sauroposeidon. I found it in a Discovery Channel store in Dallas, Texas, late in 2000. They must have made them in a hurry, since we only announced the beast's existence in the late fall of 1999. And they made them without our knowledge or input, since I first learned that the toy existed when I saw it in the store. I'm not complaining, mind you. As far as I'm concerned, once the thing is out there, it's out there, and people can do with it what they want. I'm just saying that as the primary namer of the dinosaur, I was shocked to see it incarnated as a toy. Pleasantly shocked and flattered as hell, but shocked nonetheless.

Oh, and they're not available anymore. I wish I'd bought a dozen. As it is, I only have the one. I bought one each for my mom and my grandma, too. Mom ties a red ribbon around the neck of hers at Christmas, which is kinda touching.

About the only other thing to tell about it is something my brother Todd said. When I was all stressed out about my oral qualifying exams, he told me that I should just walk into the exam room, set the plush Sauroposeidon on the table, and ask, "Any questions?" I thought that was pretty funny, but I'm pretty sure my committee wouldn't have.

Anyway, here's a photo of the thing with the NHM Brachiosaurus for scale--and, conveniently, to scale.


P.S. If you're burning with curiosity about who's who in the photo at the top, here's the best I can do, from left to right by head position, with genus, maker, and purchase location where available.

Apatosaurus, Wild Safari
Brachiosaurus, Wild Safari
Brachiosaurus skeleton, maker unknown, DNM gift shop
Brachiosaurus (little rubber guy in front row)
Apatosaurus (plush)
Amargasaurus, Carnegie collection
Brachiosaurus (LRG in front row), tube 'o dinos from the Smithsonian
Cetiosaurus, NHM collection, NHM gift shop
Mamenchisaurus (head down near LRG), Carnegie collection
Brachiosaurus, Schleich collection, Stuttgart museum gift shop
Sauroposeidon, Discovery Channel store, Dallas
mystery sauropod skeleton, Arby's kids meal, San Jose
Brachiosaurus, NHM collection, gift from Tony Campagna
Apatosaurus, Schleich collection, hardware store in Enid, OK
Brachiosaurus, Carnegie collection
Brachiosaurus (LRG in front row), Cal Acad gift shop
Brachiosaurus (plush), Field Museum gift shop
mystery sauropod Mexican bobble-head, gift from Alan and Sophie Shabel
Mamenchisaurus, NHM collection, NHM gift shop
Corythosaurus (not a sauropod), found on beach in Santa Cruz
mystery caveman, ditto
baby Apatosaurus, Carnegie collection
LEGO Brachiosaurus, Wal-Mart
Brachiosaurus, Burger King kids meal, gift from Terry Cooper
Apatosaurus (pewter)
Brontosaurus, Mold-a-Rama machine, Field Museum

The last one is one of my favorites, and noteworthy because you can still get one if you can get your ass to Chicago. In the basement of the Field Museum, right outside the McDonalds, are four huge Mold-a-Rama machines from the 50s that will form a Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Apatosaurus out of hot stinking carcinogenic plastic right before your eyes. I really wanted to complete my set (of 1) when I was there last summer, but slave-driver Mike insisted that seeing the Brachiosaurus holotype was more important. Whatever!

Dr. Vector, interior decorator

I'm not going to lie to you: I like toys. Legos, Star Wars, Transformers, dinosaurs--all of that. Is it unseemly for a 31-year-old married father of one to want to acquire and play with toys? Not at all.

First, toys are cool. That's a tough one to argue with.

Second, there's Jarrod's infamous defense of adults playing with toys: someday our kids are going to be buying toys. We don't want them to be stuck with the pathetic offerings of a dried-up toy industry. Therefore it's our responsibility to support those toymakers now by buying and using their products.

Finally, it is reassuring to know that I am not alone.

Toys are on my mind right now because the move afforded me the opportunity to get a couple of things out of the box and put them up. One of them is the Lego Ultimate Collectors' Series Y-Wing, which is 26 inches long and a foot wide and contains 1473 pieces. But I'm going to wait and blog about that after I've gotten Vicki to take some good pictures of me holding it.

An equally large box contains the Lego Millennium Falcon that Mike Taylor sent me, apparently just for being a good person. I haven't gotten around to building that one, but it's coming. In the meantime, and to continue the run of photos of me in compromising positions, here's a photo showing how much I love my as-yet-unbuilt Millennium Falcon.

The other thing that I was able to get out of the box is my King Kong V-rex bust. This thing has a complicated history. I am often stumped when someone wants to buy me a big gift, because my day-to-day yearnings are for small, cheap things like paperbacks and comic books. I rarely want things that are both expensive and practical. If someone says they're looking to spend 50 bucks on me, I usually ask for something at least a little outlandish.

Last Christmas, Vicki asked me what I wanted and I told her that I was quite taken with the King Kong V-rex skull.

This is a nice little 8-inch model skull of the new movie's tyrannosaur, the fictional Vastatosaurus rex. It's comparable in size to a human skull, and I thought it would look cool next to the cast human skull I got Vicki for Christmas several years ago.

Vicki was game and ordered the thing well in advance of Christmas, which was good, because they were going to be shipping it from New Zealand. But it didn't arrive. When they missed the delivery window, Vicki got online and zapped a few e-mails around to try to find out what the hell was going on with her order.

At this point I have to express some serious admiration for the people at Weta. They had lost her order, but they were apologetic, and they promised to get it in the mail straightaway. And they did.
Shortly thereafter, an improbably large box arrived on our doorstep. Much too large and too heavy to contain a little 8-inch skull and stand, unless the skull was made out of collapsed matter. I tore open the shipping box and received one of the most pleasant surprises of my life. I don't know if it was just a mistake, or if the folks at Weta felt bad about depriving me of a Christmas present. Don't know, and don't care.

Because they didn't send me the V-rex skull, which retails for about $40 and which Vicki had paid for a month prior. They sent the V-rex bust, which retails over $200. And they sent it from New Zealand. So I could hardly send it back; the postage would be more than the cost of the item.

More to the point, I didn't want to send it back.

This is no small, tasteful knickknack like a model dinosaur skull on a stand. This imposing sumbitch is 10 inches wide, 18 inches tall, and stands out from the wall 18 inches. It is hideous...hideously AWESOME!!!!!

I really can't say enough good things about it. The modeling, casting, and painting are all first-rate. It looks like a damn tyrannosaur just busted through the wall looking for someone's ass to kick. And it looks pissed.

Purists will have noted that the movie tyrannosaur has three fingers per hand, when real-life tyrannosaurids only had two. But whoever sculpted this beauty was pretty savvy. Each hand does have three fingers, but they are cleverly arranged so that it's almost impossible to see more than two of them at once. So on casual inspection the V-rex looks like a T-rex. Which is nice, and may help Weta move a little more product. More power to 'em, sez me.

So of course I wanted to put it up in the living room, right over the entertainment center. You know, really make it the centerpiece of Casa Wedel. Well, Vicki was having none of that. She wouldn't let me put it up in our old place at all. She said I'd have to wait until we moved.

Well, as any decent negotiator can tell you, that was Mistake #1. We were only going to be in the other place for a handful of months. She should have let me put it up wherever I wanted in exchange for a reduced sentence after the move.

Our new front door opens onto a short hallway that takes you into the rest of the apartment. I really wanted to put the thing up at the front of the hallway, so that the first thing you'd see when you came in was a pissed-off tyrannosaur about your bite your head off. But Vicki wasn't having any of that, either. She said I could put it up over the aquarium, and only over the aquarium.

That was Mistake Numero Dos. If I'd gotten my way, Rex would be in the hallway and we'd only see it when we passed through. The kitchen/dining room/living room here is all one big, long space, and even though Rex is hanging in the far corner, it is amazing and gratifying to see how much it visually dominates the room. It's large enough to be visible from anywhere in the living area, and it draws the eye. It couldn't be more noticeable if pirates were riding around it on flying sharks and throwing bears at people.

That lamp in front of the aquarium has to go, obviously. I offered to set up my herd of sauropods somewhere else, but Vicki said she'd gotten used to them being on top of the bookcase. And they do make a nice visual segue to Rex.

More toy-related blogging soon.