1/48 Revell Monogram Rescue LM

Gallery Article by Steve Sliger on Dec 22 2010

 

 

Back around 1967-1968, Grumman engineers where studying different missions for follow on variants of their Lunar Module, the spacecraft designed to land man on the Moon.  One variant was the "Rescue LM", which was an Earth orbital vehicle conceived to be used to service satellites (or disable enemy ones), or any mission requiring its capabilities.  The engineers concept drawing I based my model on was shown in the Rescue mode.  An astronaut that was incapacitated (during a space walk) being rescued by use of the robotic arm & fellow astronauts.

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The model: 
This model is a kit bash between the old original issue Revell & the Monogram kits. The reason, simple, while I was assembling the Revell ascent stage, I dropped it on the floor & it was trashed. So I replaced it with the ascent stage from a Monogram kit with a trashed descent stage. The ascent stage is built straight from the box with the exception of the use of the manuvering thrusters from the Revell kit. I also added the 2 astronauts from the Revell kit to crew the cabin in my model. I painted the ascent stage in the black & white scheme using Tamiya white primer & flat black paint. 

The descent stage (from the Revell kit) was used mainly due to the kit having foldable landing gear which was inaccurate. Since the model didn't need the landing gear, I chose to use this kit. I built it straight from the box, covering it with aluminum foil which was airbrushed Tamiya flat white (with a couple of drops of flat blue to prevent yellowing). I painted trimmed sections of aluminum foil flat black as per the color scheme. Since the Revell descent stage would not allow the Monogram descent stage to sit flush on it, I had to cut a hole in the Revell descent stage. To cover up the big hole, I used aluminum foil to make a compartment to allow the Monogram ascent stage engine to sit in the Revell descent stage. The robotic arm was a challenge, I thought why not use one out of a Space Shuttle kit. So I checked both the original Revell & Monogram 1/72 scale Shuttle kits I had & chose the Monogram version. I mounted the robotic arm by drilling & inserting a small brass pin into the base of the robotic arm. I drilled & placed a small section of brass tubing into the descent stage. This allowed more strength for the robotic arm base. I added the front porch (painted Tamiya flat red) & the descent stage main engine (painted Tamiya Metallic Silver). 

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This model took me a better part of a year to build (on & off). I enjoyed taking a concept & building it into a model. Hope you like it.

Steve Sliger

Photos and text © by Steve Sliger