Saturday, October 18, 2008

39 Vintage Resin Displays of Flown Apollo 7-17


Here's an incredible collection of vintage resin displays made up with a piece of flown kapton foil and ablator heatshield material from every manned Apollo spacecraft mission. These are from the collection of a North American Aviation engineer who inspected the inner pressure hull of every Apollo and space shuttle. These resin pieces were made by a friend of his at NAA in 1974 and according to this gentleman, there were only 3 of the complete sets on the wood and white plastic boards.


These displays were made with RTV for the molds and different sized light bulbs for the dome shape. Photographs of the mission logos were embedded in the resin after the foil & heatshield material was added, then the last clear layer was poured. A final white layer was added for the background and it took a lot of work to make these. The small white plastic display board resin pieces are 1" in diameter and the large Apollo 11 & 17 resin pieces are 5.5" in diameter. This is the 2nd largest collection of vintage resin pieces that I've been able to find.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello - I was very happy to find your blog on space artifacts, as it helped answer a mystery for me. I have one of these resin sets with the globes of the 10 manned Apollo missions 7-17. It is mounted on a triangular (space capsule shaped?)dark blue plastic backing, and each of the domes has the fragments of ablator heatshield material and kapton foil clearly visible in the clear resin beneath each mission logo emblem.
I would be happy to email you images of this item for your collection if you like, and would be interested to know more about these rare and wonderful creations.
Best regards,
Scott Colling

Ray Holt said...

Scott, I would love to see your display but you left no contact info.

Unknown said...

Hi Ray - You can contact me at progrockdoc@gmail.com with your email address.
I'll be happy to email you images of the item and a brief summary of how i acquired it.
Best regards,
Scott