Bob Koenn’s Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules
A couple of years back I decided I would like to do a high accuracy build of the US manned spacecraft from the ‘60s. These were available in 1/48th scale which is a scale I particularly liked so that is what I planned for. Of course I didn’t include a shuttle as an orbiter in that scale would be absurd. The kits available were the ‘60s Revell Mercury/Gemini kit with two Apollo kits possible, the older Revell Apollo CSM kit or the newer Dragon CSM kit. Both are out of production currently but can be found on eBay and from random sources. First I got the Revell Apollo kit but found out it was very poor accuracy wise and that the New Ware enhancement set wasn’t really made for it. I managed to find a couple of Dragon kits online still available from China so I picked up two of them at a decent price.
Since I wanted to make these much more accurate than the original kits I also looked around for enhancement sets. Real Space Models makes a Mercury and a Gemini conversion set consisting of resin and plastic parts so I bought one of each. New Ware makes a resin and photoetch set for the Dragon kit so I picked that up as well. The Mercury and Gemini kits are so old they weren’t very accurate when designed and the enhancements really make a difference. The Mercury conversion actually replaces the capsule outer shell as well as the escape rocket.
The Gemini fixes the shape of the hatch recesses which requires grinding out the part of the capsule where the corrected parts go. It also supplies much more accurate thrusters as well as a vacuum formed reentry module cover with gold foil to simulate the real one.
For the Apollo kit I bought the New Ware enhancement package consisting of resin replacement parts as well as a large number of photo-etch parts which were extremely small but helped make a better model. I also bought Space Model Systems decals for all three models.
The Mercury capsule was a reasonably good kit although assembling the tower is a bit difficult gluing all the parts together while maintaining alignment with the small parts. As I mentioned earlier I used the replacement outer shell made of resin and the escape rocket from Real Space. The Gemini kit was similar to the Mercury in accuracy and modeling difficulty. I replaced the depressions on the leading edge of the hatches with the Real Space resin replacement parts which required grinding out plastic and then gluing in the resin parts to match the mold line correctly. That was a bit difficult to get the correct alignment and fill in the voids but looked nice after all the work was completed. I used the resin thruster parts which were very accurate and the difference from the kit parts was quite noticeable and the aft reentry module vacuum formed cover. Real Space also makes an enhancement set for the 1/24th scale Gemini capsule.
I had a bit of a purchasing problem with the Apollo kit and enhancement set. I bought the enhancement from Cult and found out after I received it that it was for the Dragon model and not really at all for the Revell/Monogram kit I had on hand. That kit is a rather poor model of the Apollo CSM so I did some internet searching and found a source in China for the OOP Dragon kit. Dragon models also made a prebuilt display model which I got from eBay in error and if you decide to do a build like this make sure you get the kit and not the display model. So finally after a couple of months of getting things right I had the kit with a usable enhancement set. Building the Dragon kit is fairly easy but is it not highly detailed so the New Ware parts really help. The primary parts were the SM resin nozzle, PE antennas, resin thruster nozzles, and numerous PE parts such as CM handles, PE CSM panel surface panels, etc. I used Testors and Alclad metallic lacquers to get a better metal simulation than acrylic paints on many parts.
After completing the models I wanted a common display stand so I bought a wood plaque at Michaels and finished it up with brass posts for the models. I was very pleased with the results and entered it a day or so after the initial build at a contest in Tampa where it took first place in the space model category. I hadn’t quite finished everything for that contest so a bit later I completed the remaining detail work, primarily the PE parts on the Apollo CM.
Bob Koenn
