I've been photo-documenting my build on Twitter.

Mentioned Owen Garriot and Richard Garriot, and the latter replied:

"Speaking of which, I need a 1:72 scale Saturn 1B of SL3..."

I guess the closest he'll find is the Apogee model. Just needs a new paint job and decals, right?

My son built his SEMROC version with a removable mount. It's flown on single D12-3's, 4 B6's, and 3 C6's. We didn't fly on 4 C6's because of our limited recovery area. You know the chances of landing in a tree grows exponentially with the amount of time spent building and finishing a model!

IIRC, it flew great on our combination of 2 B6-2's and 2B-64's. The delay was about right and you didn't have four charges kicking the crap out of the NC. Three C6-3's were about perfect also. It might go a little long on the B6/C6-5 combo. (His was a little heavy with the removable mount and plenty of priming and sanding to get a slick finish.)

Interesting about spacing out the delays. The second burst might be good for shoving out any balky chutes.

Maybe 2 x C6-5, 2 x C6-6 might be good for mine.

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I ordered the last set of Semroc decals, and a triplet of Apollo style parachutes, from eRockets. I should have the painting done by the time they arrive. I plan on using white and black pin-stripe tape to border the areas I hand-painted w/o masking.

My remaining worry is the masking on the black tanks. I have nightmares of the tape tearing off the white paint underneath, or the border being leaky. Fingers crossed!

If all goes well, and it returns from its flight, this might be the first rockets I built a display stand for and put in my living room.

Nobody has made a 18mm C6-6 since Cox discontinued that motor in like 1972.

I think that was a typo and he meant B6-6.

I actually meant C6-7, but B6-6 is an option!

I found something interesting on the original KD-29 decal sheet. (Included in the kit purchased in December 1974.)

In the lower right corner, below the KD-29, is what looks like hand writing:

67F2GA

or possibly G7F26A . . . the writing is small and the 6s could be Gs or vice-versa.

Could this be a date code? Does anyone have an image of an earlier or later whole decal sheet?

Conceivably, this could be a date code, or version number.

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My painting is coming along. After some touch-up along the margins, I'm done.

Then:

Decals

Paint antenna silver

Glue on the antenna panels.

Glue on SM attitude jets and umbilical.

Matte coating

In parallel, I need to paint the escape tower.

I'll probably use sharpies to put in some of the "launch configuration" capsule detail, as shown in the Semroc version instruction sheet.

Yeah, that's the same code on the decals from my 1968 kit (scan posted in this thread yesterday afternoon).

The first two characters are 67, which I assume come from the year of their original manufacture which would be 1967.

Looks like the code stayed the same between 67 and 74.

Earl

I pencilled in the "launch mode" CM details, and inked them with a pen that wasn't as permanent as I'd like; some of it rubbed off. I may try to paint in the larger details.

Painted the attitude jet bodies and umbilical with a mix of silver and gunmetal, and the nozzles silver.

Antennas, silver.

It wasn't too clear from the Semroc directions how the umbilical should be placed, The photo on the first page of this thread seems to suggest it is in line with one of the SM attitude jets.

Comrade:

Just so you know, the antenna are yellow and the umbilical is more or less opposite from the hatch. Call it a 175 degree clockwise rotation when viewed from above. It was, as you noted, slighly offset from the thruster.

Here's the link to the Apollo Archive: http://www.apolloarchive.com/apollo_archive.html

I hope all of us build or launch something Apollo in the coming weeks and post some pictures.

Argh! The kit directions got so many little things wrong. If they were put together in 1967 I guess they had an excuse.

It will be hard to paint over the silver with yellow at this point. I could try on one and see if there's show-through.

It's easier to wipe off the pen work on the CM, so I can orient the hatch opposite the umbilical, but I wonder what else they got wrong.

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I "found" my copy of Rockets of the World. It nicely shows how to orient the SM decal and umbilical.