Edward Wilson wrote:
Steve-
I've been procrastinating on my Tamiya CVN-65 build because of the hanger (Which Greg just solved!) and than bloody lower hull. I spent 6 years on that ship, including 3 months scraping Rad_Con samples off the hull, and that stern shape makes me crazy! I was going to cut the stern off (below the waterline) and rib and skin with styrene to fix it, but a 3D printed insert would be awesome and worth the cost I think.
Hi Ed and thanks for your service and your comments!
I'm afraid a 3D-printed hull correction is not practical for a number of reasons. Most importantly for the modeler, the area needing replacement would be quite large (maybe too big for most printers) making the part prohibitively expensive to print, perhaps twice the cost of the Tamiya kit (or more). The cost to print it would be so high that no one could/would buy it.
But that's just the cost to print it. Then there is the cost to design it, which would have to be added on.
For the designer, creating parts to match plastic kit hull sections is technically very difficult, costly and time consuming. To design a part with compound curves that would match the kit's hull's compound curves, the part would likely have to be designed iteratively. In other words, an expensive donor Tamiya kit gets cut up, the curves are measured, and a new part is designed to fit and printed based on those measurements. Then the new 3D-printed part (paid for by the designer) gets test-fit to the kit hull which will be a close fit but not quite match. The CAD design is then tweaked to produce a second part that fits better. Then, 3D-printed part version 2.0 is printed (paid for by the designer) and the process repeats until a perfect match is achieved. This process becomes extremely costly for the designer, not only in buying the test pieces and the donor kit, but also the time to design it (time=money). The cost of design time for such an effort would likely dwarf the cost to print it. All of that design time, the test pieces and the donor kit has to be paid for. So those costs would have to be passed on to potential customers or eaten by the designer and his family.
I'm afraid that once a kit manufacturer pooches a hull, 3D generally cannot fix it in a practical or affordable way.
For my Tamiya kit, if I decide to correct the hull, it will be a scratch-building project, one that has its own issues and challenges. Not sure yet whether that is worth it. But that hull bugs me - the proverbial itch that requires a scratch.