Building a full-scale Apollo Command Module replica
Merry Christmas, everyone! Or, since this site has viewers from all over the world, “Feliz Navidad!” “Joyeux Nöel!” “Buon Natale!” “Fröhliche Weihnachten!” “S rozhdyestvom Hristovym!” I also want to celebrate the anniversary of Apollo 8, which left lunar orbit to return to Earth on Christmas Day. Yes, I know the
Now it’s time to start finishing up the appearance of the equipment bay half of the Command Module. I had been putting a lot of this off to prevent it from getting messed up while I worked on other things. First of all, I painted the floor. Looking at photos
I took the two hardboard faceplates for the sextant and telescope and marked the positions of the various items and attachment screws from a full-size template. I cut the hexagonal openings for the mechanical displays first, since the material would be the strongest for the jigsaw without any of the
The equipment bay half of the CM had a number of small and large doors for various purposes, mostly for storage or stowing equipment. These doors wee all attached with continuous hinges (“piano hinges”), and each had a pair of squarish openings for the latching mechanism. The latch consisted of
I needed to build a small but important detail in one of the Lower Equipment Bay (LEB) panels. On either side of the Navigation Station are attach points for a removable translation controller and a removable rotation controller. An astronaut performing celestial navigation would use these to orient the CSM
The next part I worked on was the housing for the sextant/telescope. I already had the back cut from 1/4″ MDF. I cut the sides from 1/2″ MDF, then rounded the exposed edges with a 1/8″ roundover router bit. I cut some 2″x2″ lumber for the corner braces, then attached
The most prominent portion of the Lower Equipment Bay (LEB) is the Navigation Station, where the astronauts could perform celestial navigation to realign the Inertial Monitor Unit (IMU) or navigate in the case of a system failure. And the most prominent portion of the Navigation Station is the sextant/telescope assembly.
Now that I’m cutting and fitting panels for the upper portion of the Lower Equipment Bay (LEB), I realized that the first completed control panel to be installed in the CM was probably going to be Panel 101. This is the vertical panel just to the left of the sextant/telescope
One of the goals of the project is to have working lights around the crew cabin, and hopefully working dimming circuits for them as well. There are three types of dimmers in the Command Module: those for the floodlights, those for the numerics (digital displays), and those for “integral” lights
I’m beginning to work on Panel 101, which will be one of the first completed control panels to be installed in the CM. Although the switches will be non-functional, the one gauge will be backlit. Using the same patterns for the round gauges described in an earlier article, I 3D-printed
