Hi,

I've just signed up.  My name's Norm Watson.  I was a sponsor on two of Steves' projects; the Mars Attacks movie and the Enterprise build.  Here's a piece of my work.  It was done for my old friend Roger Hill.  I am proud to have it be a part of his world class collection.

Kindest Regards,

Norm

Excellent. Thanks Eliot!

I've said it many a time; I'm a little slow sometimes. As I was watching Steve wrestle with his Mighty Space Station #5 (from the best movie of all time, 2001 A Space Odyssey,) I watched, as I say, as he built it. And 'it' only! I realized there was no little spaceplane filled with Dr. Floyd and a comely stew person) poised to enter the nice, open docking bay.
And thus, I volunteered to make one.
The flat-bottom and upside-down "U" fuselage made it an ideal subject for vacuum forming. I felt good about getting this baby hatched in a week or two. Besides, Steve said it had to be done quickly but not the due date.
I mulled over the things Steve had said about his station and what it was made of. The central hub was laid down on some kraft paper and in one shot of Steve's build, had a big ruler near it. 7" across. I am not above sticking a scale ruler on a monitor to get some relative sizes. And a 2.4" wingspan was it.
I scaled down Atkinson's plans and side view from Bizony's Filming The Future and could start cutting styrene.
I had a secret weapon... Ian "Stargazer" Walsh has made several Orions in 1:144 scale. One of those models comes in pieces that gives you a neat cross-section. I put them on the old copy machine and scaled them down to the reduced Atkinson plans and bang! Cut more styrene.
About *now* is when I started taking pictures...
Here you can see that I used the cross sections, stuck to the plan of the ship in styrene, to sculpt up the fuse. I used ApoxySculpt.
Now I had a 'buck" with which to vacuum form over.
Vacuum forming has few drawbacks, but one must be ready for them. One is a "radius" at the bottom of the formed plastic. This is from the balance of forces between the vacuum from the table and the stretchiness of the softened plastic. One has to elevate the buck a little so that the radius is below the part of the shape you want.
You can see sanding the fuselage down. I put some tape on top to grab it.

Eliot is doing that now.

At last! He waited for to long to be completed.