Australian coaster Blythe Star - 1973 - 3D print - 1/100

[Iceman 29]

I started my (personal) computing life in 1981 on an Apple IIe in my university ... slowly upgrading to a MacBook Air now

The worst year was when I had to downgrade to MS DOS in 1991, when working in Italy ... and intermittendly at other places on MS Windows.

IT guys don't like Macs, because they can't really mess around with them, giving you 'support'. Or as my first 'real' boss put it: when using a Mac, one doesn't need an IT department, because things work from the start ...

Did a lot of FORTAN, BASIC and PASCAL coding in my younger years and then, some 17 years ago, I had to take a crash-course in MathLab coding, when diving into geochemical computer modelling again.

A good route!

I started with Oric Atmos in 1980, Basic language of course, than Commodore, Atari, and PC.

Then I developed programmes on board during my 3-month contracts, for the ship, with Windev 7 and the following ones, on PC, WIn NT, 98, XP. I love this program ( French ).

https://windev.com/index.html

[Iceman 29]

Quite a few details added, bridge fin deflector, some main beam lights, searchlight, bridge fin structures, main deck to poop deck ladders.





Lights:



Floor system for installing equipments in the bridge:

[Iceman 29]

Over the next two days, I concentrated on the cargo holds - a lot of work, and a lot of research into their structures.

I decided to open up cargo hold no. 2, where you can see a bit of the cargo bags.

I hesitated to put dynamite cartons, but it's not as good visually...

[Iceman 29]

Visually, I haven't made much progress, but I've spent a lot of time correcting errors and preparing certain parts for printing, so that everything will match perfectly when it's time to assemble all these parts without any glitches...

[Fliger747]

Very nice indeed.

Cheers: Tom

[Iceman 29]

Thanks Tom, Glad to read you!

[Iceman 29]

Old photos from last night. Good progress on the front yesterday.

But that's all in the past now I made quite a few modifications today... Pictures this evening.

[Fliger747]

Speaking of ancient computers, I guess my first foray was in Fortran 4 punching stacks of cards to do analysis of gravity data. Then I had a primitive console that plugged into a TV and did programming in Basic. Took theguy who wrote Basic, Tom Kurtz and his wife on a couple of week backpacking trip in the Alaska Brooks Range. Then on to the one's that you had to format the drive and install the operating system and had "upper level" memory issues. So things have gotten better!

Amazing the things that can be done with computer design and construction! Thanks for inspiring the rest of us! Tom

[wefalck]

Yep, started off my computing 'carreer' with punching cards in Fortran at the university in around '79. There was a room full with punching machines, though graduate and PhD students already could save their coding on small tape-drives.

You had to take your stack of cards to a desk, where a graduate student would queue them for being loaded onto the card-reader. A few hours later you could collect a ream of paper, only discover that due to a minor punching error it didn't work. Same process again ...

Looking a the 3D-modelling, we have gone a loooong way since then.

[Iceman 29]

I love these stories, it's amazing what you could do with a personal computer with 8k RAM in those days...

Now it's all about opulence. With code that's not always well written.

Today's progress:

I've also started furnishing the Bridge.

Of course, I still have a lot of details to add to the foremast.

You can see the emergency anchor behind the ventilation duct. A detail that had escaped us until now.

[DrPR]

My first computer was assembled in 1976 from a bunch of S-100 bus kits - had to solder everything myself. It had a 4MHz Z-80 processor and 8K of RAM, soon expanded to 32K and 64K. To start it I had to load 32 bytes into RAM using front panel switches and lights (a REAL computer) and press RUN. That started a boot loader to read from a RS-232 serial interface.

I borrowed an ASR-33 Teletype for my console, and it took 45 minutes to load the 19 Kbyte macro assembler program from paper tape. Then I designed and wire-wrapped a cassette tape interface, and with a cheap modified cassette recorder I could load the assembler in 4.5 minutes! After that I got a used 8" floppy disk drive and designed and wire-wrapped a floppy disk interface. It could load the assembler in 45 seconds!!

I wrote a bunch of data analysis programs in BASIC, but the real programming effort went into an assembly language video oriented word processor, one of the first. It used 16K of the 64K RAM. I bought a $65 black and white television and rewired it to be a video monitor.

In 1972 I bought a new Chevrolet Camaro for $3216! That first computer cost about $3500 in 1976-78 - about $20,000 in today's money!

Phil

[Iceman 29]

I worked on the mast the day before yesterday and did nothing today.

[bigtodd]

Amazing job!!!!!!

[Iceman 29]

Thanks!

I've worked on a simulation of the rigging, only the blocks will be printed of course.

This allows me to place the anchor points for the blocks or shackles with precision.

The rigging will be made from wire drawn from old plastic bunches of the injected model.

Jims Baumann's method, filmed by Bruno Gire:
https://youtu.be/5DMjcLjHQXY

[Iceman 29]

I've been working on small details over the last few days, the antennas, the rigging and the interior of the bridge.

For the navigation bridge layout, I had to make some changes because it's been modified over the years, but luckily Nicholas passed me a sketch made by a former captain of the Blythe Star, quite precise, drawn by hand, of the latest layout. I've simplified it, of course, as you're not going to see much from the outside.

[wefalck]

The amount of (internal) detail is flabbergasting ... if I had to reproduce this with conventional machining or manual techniques, it would take decades to do - looking forward to the printed outputs

[Iceman 29]

Tks!

I could have spent a good week on this navigation bridge, but it's pointless, you won't see much on this scale.

It was christened today, an important moment.

[Fliger747]

Pascal:

Enjoyed the tour of the small bridge with all the details from the navigator's balls to the radar hood, stem heat and engine order telegraph. I don't know why by one with a single lever always looks lopsided to me. Of course many many ships are single screw design. being able to create a small world like this is an advantage of a larger scale.

Cheers: Tom

[Iceman 29]

Thanks Tom!

I printed a prototype of the front and central sections for testing purposes.

These sections will not be used, just to test the next prints of the other elements, their assembly and to test the Elegoo Rapid resin, which is perfect.

The 3 sections have already been modified in terms of design, and elements have also been added. Some of the printing supports will be moved. The small surface defect in the design on the bow has been erased. This will be for the next hull print.

These 2 test sections are not glued, of course.

There's real progress with this Photon M5s printer, plus only 4 hours to print these two parts, and I'm far from the maximum speed possible.

[wefalck]