Phil Smith Posted January 11, 2022 Share Posted January 11, 2022 (edited) About ten years ago, I built Atomic City’s 1/12 Mercury kit. I am thankful that a model kit of this historic subject in this scale is available. Other kits, some of which were produced in the 1960s and 1970s, are in smaller scales and are of relatively poor quality. The Mercury capsule is a small vehicle, essentially a spacecraft built around a man. As such, it lends itself well to being represented in kit form at a larger scale, and 1/12 is ideal. In terms of a review, the MRC/Atomic City kit is generally well produced. The outer hull, with the exception of the hatch, is molded in black, while most of the interior parts are molded in light gray. The instrument panel parts are cast in a hard clear plastic, which is a nice touch for those interested in back-lighting the dial faces and switches. The escape tower parts are molded in red. An astronaut figure is included, cast in vinyl, and is of excellent quality. A major drawback is the model’s lack of interior detail. It lacks, for instance, the forward bulkhead with hatch, helium tanks, tape recorder, interior hull details, and other parts. The interior arrangement that is provided is generic; it would have to be for simplicity sake in that each Mercury had a different capsule arrangement. Still, it is a marvelous kit to work from. In the end, however, I ended up only using a few kit parts: the outer hull, the forward recovery compartment hull piece, the backshell piece, parts of the seat, and a section of the kit’s aft bulkhead part. The rest of the model is scratch-built. For my collection, I built a representation of John Glenn’s Friendship 7 as it appeared shortly after reentry. I selected this subject because of its historical significance, and chose a post-flight configuration because of the opportunity to explore weathering and distressing techniques. Also, Glenn peppered the interior with all sorts of notes taped to the instrument panel and made various marks applied with a pen - I thought these would be fun aspects to reproduce. Oddly, there is not much data on Friendship 7 readily available online. But the most important resource (beyond the actual vehicle, located at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC) is the NASA Project Mercury Familiarization Manual (NASA SEDR 104), November 1961. This document is similar in some ways to the kind of manual you might find for a car in that it contains many drawings of individual components and their placement, plumbing and wiring diagrams, and various other interesting elements that are invaluable to a modeler wishing to build a Friendship 7 model. Essentially, this was the only resource I used, occasionally supplemented by photos found online. I did not live in the Washington, DC area at the time. If I did, I would have visited the actual artifact and taken copious notes. As it happened, I got a few things wrong; for example, I did not build the correct version of the seat used for Glenn’s flight (I screwed that up royally, discovering this problem after the build was long complete). But no worries, as was quite happy with the result and enjoyed the journey! Edited January 11, 2022 by Phil Smith CODY, Rick Griewski, Cheetah11 and 33 others 30 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark_C Posted January 11, 2022 Share Posted January 11, 2022 Very nicely done! I have one of those in my stash, and really should get on with it. Phil Smith 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Out2gtcha Posted January 11, 2022 Share Posted January 11, 2022 Wow, that really doe look amazing! Phil Smith 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rick Griewski Posted January 11, 2022 Share Posted January 11, 2022 The exterior looks very convincing. Phil Smith 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LSP_Kevin Posted January 11, 2022 Share Posted January 11, 2022 Wow, that is amazing! Kev Phil Smith 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Barry Posted January 11, 2022 Share Posted January 11, 2022 That is absolutely fantastic sir!! Barry Phil Smith 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shawn M Posted January 11, 2022 Share Posted January 11, 2022 wonderful work! I've been stockpiling references to do this kit myself. Phil Smith 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LSP_K2 Posted January 11, 2022 Share Posted January 11, 2022 I love this. Real nice finish on the exterior. Phil Smith 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rockie Yarwood Posted January 12, 2022 Share Posted January 12, 2022 Spectacular build and finish. Thanks, Phil, for sharing this with the group. Cheers, Rockie Phil Smith 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dodgem37 Posted January 12, 2022 Share Posted January 12, 2022 Great work. Great show. Sincerely, Mark Phil Smith 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rob Owens Posted January 12, 2022 Share Posted January 12, 2022 Truly a museum piece! Have you thought about donating it to the NASM? Phil Smith 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thomas Lund Posted January 12, 2022 Share Posted January 12, 2022 Seriously beautiful work - exterior and interior looks spot on. Cool detail with Glenn's personalization. The open area in the... uhm... nose, is that the parachute compartment ? Don't think I've seen that open in any pictures (although I'm not an expert) Phil Smith 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Troy Molitor Posted January 12, 2022 Share Posted January 12, 2022 That is really spectacular. Thanks for sharing this with us. Phil Smith 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Smith Posted January 12, 2022 Author Share Posted January 12, 2022 2 hours ago, Thomas Lund said: Seriously beautiful work - exterior and interior looks spot on. Cool detail with Glenn's personalization. The open area in the... uhm... nose, is that the parachute compartment ? Don't think I've seen that open in any pictures (although I'm not an expert) Thanks, Thomas. That is indeed the parachute compartment, plus a variety of equipment including a UHF antenna, a light beacon, and so forth. Somehow, the astronaut also had the capability to bend the instrument panel from the right and squeeze through a circular forward hatch and through the parachute compartment(!). Mostly, this was populated using information from the manual cited in the original post as few photos exist of this compartment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil Smith Posted January 12, 2022 Author Share Posted January 12, 2022 (edited) 6 hours ago, Rob Owens said: Truly a museum piece! Have you thought about donating it to the NASM? Thank you for that. I have not thought about that, though as a NASM docent perhaps I would have a chance to submit. The Smithsonian gets so much crap delivered to it every year that I'm afraid the model would get lost in the shuffle Edited January 12, 2022 by Phil Smith Alex 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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