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Standa Archman after work at the hotel in Varese.
Jakub Nademlejnsky in CH-47 Chinook in Volandia. The author at an artistic pizza in Varese.
A cement truck overturned across
the highway, stranding both
directions until the spilled load
was removed.
A nice four-hour traffic jam
on the way to Bergamo.
and that we needed to find documentation for the
P-51B wheel wells. Not that we didn't have such
documentation before, but our sources featured
P-51A bays. Getting photos and drawings of the
right bay was not easy, but thanks to John Ferdic,
Ed Mautner, Billy Crisler and Brian Niklas, we
got access to some during September. And so,
shortly after E-day, Stan was able to begin the
redesign of those damn wheel wells.
But another complication arose. As the work
on tooling up progressed, the time for the
redesign of the wells began to get away from us
a bit. If we were to complete the entire project by
April and officially release the first kit of the new
Mustang in May, the tooling for the last mold, the
one incorporating the parts of the protagonist of
this essay, the wheel well, had to be finished by
October. The basic prerequisite for meeting this
deadline was the completion of the redesign in
the first week of October. And that was exactly
the time we were scheduled to travel to Italy.
There we needed to see another P-40, in this case
a P-40F, and above all, we had an appointment to
scan a Macchi C.205 at the Leonardo factory near
Varese, a visit to the museum in Vigna di Valle,
where they also have other Macchi fighters, and
we were supposed to end the Italian part of the
trip at a local model exhibit in Bergamo. It was
practically impossible to cancel the trip.
Stan decided to work on the redesign during
the course of the trip. He bought a 12V voltage
converter for the car's electrical system to
220V, which is needed to power his laptop.
We loaded the scanner, boxes of kits needed
for the exhibition, our luggage and a supply of
coffee, and the team of Vladimír Šulc, Jakub
Nademlejnský and Stanislav Archman headed
out on the first leg of our trip, Cheb-Munich-
Bregenz-Vaduz-Varese. From the driver's point
of view, the first part of the journey from Most to
the German border beyond Cheb went smoothly,
only strange mouse clicks and dark cursing
could be heard from the back of the car. Before
Regensburg, however, the situation calmed
down, and during a break in Vadus, Stan looked
relatively optimistic, and it seemed that the well
would acquire the right proportions during the
journey, but a wrench was occasionally thrown
into the mix. For example, he reduced the
sensitivity of the mouse to the lowest possible
level, because hitting an icon while moving
the mouse inside of a moving car, noting that
the Siemens NX program utilizes such icons,
is really a very difficult activity. We normal non-
designers do not notice the tiny vibrations driving
can generate or how relevant they can be in such
an endeavor. Another problem was unexpected
braking, because he didn't have the laptop fixed
to anything, and it had a tendency to drift away
uncontrollably when braking. The laptop also
had a tendency to heat up significantly, another
thing that one doesn't fully realize when working
with a laptop normally.
ARTICLES
INFO Eduard
15
April 2024