Space-Themed Bunk Bed, Part 4

 This weekend's work on the bunk bed planets consists of filling in the wood grain of the plywood cutouts to make smoother surfaces for painting.

This is done by applying several coats of thinned carpenter's wood filler and sanding in between coats.

Here are all of the planets just after the second coat has been brushed on:

It will likely take a third coat before the grain is adequately filled in. Sanded high-grade birch plywood has pretty decent original surfaces to begin with and thus don't require too much prep work to achieve smooth results.

I bet you are wondering what that strange semi-circular piece is doing among the planet cutouts.

That will be revealed in due time.

Stay tuned ...

Space-Themed Bunk Bed, Part 3

It's planet-building day in the Rockies !!

Normally, I do most of my woodworking projects with hand tools, but today I am going to forsake the coping saw and fire up the shop scroll-saw instead.  I would like to see this project through to completion by the second week of March, so the sacrifice of a few electrons will serve to save me a lot of time. 

Surprisingly, I was able to knock out all eight planets and the moon in only a little over an hour, including a couple of short Mountain Dew breaks!

Once the "cuttin' was done" I hit the discs with some sanding blocks to even up any residual scroll saw cut marks on the outer edges.  After that, all the planets (and moon) received some round-over sanding on the top edges.

Here's a shot of the Solar System, laid out all nice and purty:

Next post -  it's paint prep time....

Space-Themed Bunk Bed, Part 2

 Today's post is a continuation of drawing out the remaining planetary discs on sheets of birch plywood.

With the most difficult one, Saturn, completed, I proceeded to render the patterns for the remaining outer planets - Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune.  The latter two were drawn as regular circles, with no attempt to duplicate any type of elongation.  

For the inner planets, I went with a much different size scale.  I couldn't stay with the same scale as the large outer planets, else they would be insanely tiny!

Using a five- inch diameter Earth, the other planets were quite easy to scale.   I even included a small  Moon to scale, which came out to roughly 1-1/2 inches in diameter.

Here are the ply sheets, all ready to take to the scroll saw:

Stay tuned...

Space Themed Bunk Bed, Part 1

 Designing A Solar System...

The initial stage of this fun project is to design a set of plywood cutouts depicting each of Ol' Sol's eight planets.

Since the bunk bed has very limited amounts of open surfaces, I will need to size the objects very carefully in order to make everything fit.

The Gas Giants...

These, of course, are the largest four planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus.

I arbitrarily decided to make my version of Jupiter with a seven-inch disc. The other three planets will be drawn to the same scale, with the relative sizes gleaned from a table of planetary statistics.

Since I wish to depict the planets as accurately as possible, I need to take into account the proper shapes of the discs.

Both Jupiter and Saturn rotate very rapidly on their axis, causing their gaseous atmospheres to create an equatorial bulge and flattening at the poles. In other words, the discs of both planets appear to be slightly oval.

How do I depict this properly?

If you have read earlier posts in this blog you will find that I was involved in the hobby of astronomy back in the mid 1980s.

A major aspect of that activity involved observing the two planets and carefully rendering drawings of what was seen through the eyepiece.

I was a member of both the Association of Lunar and Planetary Observers (U.S.),  and the British Astronomical Society. Both organizations relied on the observations of dedicated amateur astronomers to provide data throughout the planets' yearly apparitions. This consisted of accurate drawings of visible details and central meridian transit timings of prominent details. 

A.L.P.O provided standard templates for drawing in such details.

I still have some of these.

The template for Jupiter clearly shows the oval shape of the disc.

Templates for Saturn were provided showing the various inclinations of the planet's rings throughout it's long orbital period.  Templates were provided in two-degree increments from 0 degrees (rings viewed edge-on) to 28 degrees full inclination.

For my cutout of Saturn, I chose to go with the 22 degree template. It shows enough of the ring structure while still making visible the planetary disc behind the near portion of the ring.

Now it was just a matter of making enlarged copies of the templates on the printer to match the same size as my proposed cutouts.

Easy-Peasy!

Here is a pic of the pattern of Saturn applied to a sheet of 1/4" Baltic birch plywood.

More solar system building to come in the next post....