At this point, we were around the middle of June and the amount of actual hands on labor was under 24 hours over the course of 2 or 3 weeks of working on it here and there. The plan of using technology to do all the hardwork was paying off, so i invested in a new piece of equipment. I had been wanting and researching SLA printers for months trying to find a budget SLA printer (around $500 or less) and for years, this was impossible. In early summer of this year, i came across the Elegoo Mars SLA printer. After a few months of research, i saw it was on Amazon for $250, so i purchased one and started using it to print some of the small surface detail pieces that would be near impossible to do on a conventional 3d printer.










Having purchased a 30” vinyl cutter a few years prior, i decided to draw out all of the panel lines for the flying surfaces in cad and have the vinyl cutter cut those out. This worked extremely well.









Then one day while sitting in Nyc i had the realization that it Might be possible to cut out out all of the panel line and rivet details all at once to be placed on the parts in a single application. I did some testing with varying style cutters, speeds and rivet sizes on the vinyl cutter and found out it was possible, so i went back to Cad and added all of these details to the vertical stab, rudder, wings and flaps.






I then cut out the vertical stab and rudder pieces and applied them to those plugs.









i also applied the details to the horizontal stab. Unfortunately i need to remove the center row of rivets and place 2 equidistant rows instead. I did this the old
fashioned way.